Loose Ends
by simplyprologue
Summary: All the loose ends we leave behind, unspooled threads of twine that tie us together, what do we do with them? —Six shots ring out on the twenty-third floor of the AWM building at just past one-thirty in the afternoon. (Post-Genoa retraction AU. WIP. Ensemble, Mac-centric.)
1. Chapter One

**A/N: **This year I decided to cheat at NaNoWriMo and just write fanfiction instead. I don't know how frequently this will update, just as I don't know how much time I'll have to devote to editing chapters as they're written, and anytime I make a promise about updating fic it all falls through, so let's just say you'll get it at you get it. Major thanks to everyone who encouraged me to scrap my one fic about MacKenzie getting shot and replace it with an even more terrible fic about MacKenzie getting shot. Inspiration comes largely from Greg Laswell's "Off I Go."

This fic is ensemble, but focuses mainly on MacKenzie, and to a lesser extent, Jim.

Major** trigger warnings** for gun violence. Any additional trigger warnings will be included in chapter notes if they come up.

* * *

**CHAPTER ONE**

* * *

_Did you say it? Make a plan, set a goal, work towards it? All the loose ends we leave behind, unspooled threads of twine that tie us together, what do we do with them? We can all be left behind. Life doesn't just hand us light bulb moments. It makes us claw our way into realizations—cut the thread, or pull it back. We have to work for it._

_We have to do it ourselves. Make our own painful realizations, and pray that we aren't too late._

_Did you say it?_

* * *

Six shots ring out on the twenty-third floor of the AWM building at just past one-thirty in the afternoon. The weapon being discharged is a semi-automatic; the shooter, a white male in his late twenties in a food service delivery uniform.

There is no warning. (The ones who truly intend to kill you rarely give it; Will McAvoy was right about that much.)

Glass shatters around a vacuum of sound, and a cacophony of screams rise up after it, people fleeing to dark corners and under desks while bodies hit the floor. A computer screen is blown out, electrical wire shorting as the power flickers off but the electricity does not, the acrid smell of singed motherboard drafting out from the dead monitor in the wake of a bullet.

There are four people in the room for whom dodging bullets is not a new phenomenon; two of which feel truly comfortable in its practice.

That is to say—MacKenzie and Jim hit the floor and immediately seek out shelter against a desk, and Mac for some reason all she can remember is how one of the last few times they did this Jim tackled her to the ground in response to the sudden loud report of insurgency fire, and got shot in the ass, and how she'd yelled at him during the eight hour truck ride back to base—his head in her lap, completely miserable, in the back of a covered truck pitching side to side on a dirt road—to never, ever, try to protect her again. He seems to have remembered that, this time, breathing hard under someone's work station, eyes wide and locked on hers.

Her office is ten feet away, her bathroom little more than that and this entire fucking building is made of glass.

Shots keep ringing out, people keep screaming, and Mac and Jim keep their heads, as if they're back in the war and not here, at home, as if this isn't completely ludicrous and as if she isn't in Louboutins and a designer skirt instead of ratty cargo pants and combat boots, and if Mac squeezes her eyes tight enough, maybe she'll be back in Peshawar and all of this will make sense.

(There's no time to make this make sense, she—_they_, need to _move_.)

She turns her head, sees Don crouching across the aisle. She doesn't shout his name (protocol rapidly taking over—don't let them know where you are, don't give them a target to shoot at, don't scream, don't yell names, just get low to the ground and keep moving, _keep moving_, it's harder to hit a moving target, just _keep moving_), but waits for him to turn his head in their direction. It takes a blissfully small amount of time, and Mac gestures to her office, and she's never been gladder that she's left the door open.

_Let's go_, she mouths.

Before the chaos ends.

Thirty seconds have passed since the first bullet was sprayed into her staff, thirty seconds, maybe; it feels so much longer, like each second has been stretched out one in front of the other, and the leap in-between each is too much for her to think about at the moment. The string is pulled taut and Mac squeezes her eyes shut again, heart pounding. _Just keep moving, before you lose your nerve_. Tries not to think about Will, who had been in his office, Will who was surely one of the targets, or _the_ target, tries not to think about Charlie who had been with him, with Sloan and Elliot while she and Don had been out here, and she hears the mechanical click of a gun chamber releasing, an ammo casing being dropped onto the floor, and now—_fucking now_—

Grabs Jim's hand she bolts for her office, dives through the door, and prays that Don is behind them. Shoves the door to her bathroom open (why does this building have _so much fucking glass_, and why is none of it bullet proof, let alone sound proof) and swings Jim through, letting go of his hand, her hand a glancing shove between Don's shoulders as she gets him into her bathroom too. Turns around, thinking, _how many people are in her bullpen? How many rooms don't have fucking glass walls? Is that blood? Who's been hit? Who's hurt? Is anybody dead out there?_

The shooter is reloading, and she feels Jim's hand (she knows it's Jim, they've been here before, after all, he's dragged her out of the stifling press of riots and gunfire before; Mac's always had a problem with wanting to stay and watch, she's a reporter, she wants the information) wrap around her forearm and then, fuck—

_Maggie_.

—is huddled under her desk, curled up into herself, legs bent in front of her, the fronts of her thighs tucked all the way up against her chest, with her arms wrapped tight around herself, eyes shut against it all even more tightly. Paralyzed with fear, Mac thinks the girl might be counting to herself, her lips wrapping around silently-formed and released numbers, trying to breathe around a panic attack.

Mac stops, breaking her own momentum forward, looking back.

It's a split-second decision, but an easy one. She won't leave her there, she can't leave her there, she was the one who sent Maggie off to fucking Uganda, she won't leave Maggie out in the gunfire again. Mac's eyes flicker to the shooter, who is still rooting through his bag for his next round of ammunition, and she goes without a second thought.

"Mac, what the fuck—?" she hears Don half-shout, voice straining to keep quiet, but she's off, her high heels abandoned, kicked off onto the carpet, and she just needs to get to Maggie before bullets start flying again.

Any tactical advantage to having abandoned her four-inch heels is immediately fucked over by the fact that she's now barefoot and running on broken glass, but the fifteen feet from her office and Maggie's hiding spot evaporates quickly and Mac finds herself on her knees in front of the girl, framing her face with her hands.

"Maggie," she distantly hears herself whispering, as if the words are filtering through water. "Maggie, darling, look at me, come on, we have to get out of here, come on, open your eyes, that's it, that's my girl, come-on-come-on-come-on, we have to move, sweetheart—"

_Margaret Jordan. Call me Maggie_, she hears, the audio memory swirling about in the back of her mind over the sound of a gun cocking, and really, Mac never thought that Genoa would actually kill them, but here they are. It's a lot like _MacKenzie McHale. Call me Mac. Charlie Skinner brought me in to be your new EP. It's nice to meet, you, Will._

"Maggie, please," and she realizes she's pleading, frantically rubbing her thumbs over Maggie's cheeks and there's _no time_.

_Keep moving_.

She wrenches Maggie out from under the desk, tucking the smaller girl under her arm, covering her head with her hand, pressing Maggie's forearm into the space between her bicep and her shoulder. _Keep moving_. There's no time to crouch down, and Mac doesn't think she could manage it, anyway, even though Maggie is slight and can't weigh all that much and there's adrenaline surging through her veins, and faintly, she hears herself whispering _come on _over and over again into Maggie's ear, and the seconds are all stretched out again. _Keep moving_. They're targets but they're running and the door to the bathroom is open, pulled in and open to the bullpen and she knows that Jim and Don are waiting for them and she forces herself not to think about anyone else, especially not Will (Charlie, Sloan, Tess, Tamara, Gary, Kendra, Neal, Elliot, Martin), and she swallows a scream when the first bullet shatters the glass wall of her office.

_Keep moving_.

Running, and it's five feet and closing and Maggie is ducked under her arm, she'll be safe, she has to be safe, they'll all _be safe_, because they have to be, and this is all her fault, it's pounding in her ears over and over again, _Genoa, Genoa, Genoa_, the off-beat drum to _keep moving_, which has been the thrum in her veins for as long as she could remember, from diplomatic post to post to station to station to here and away to New York to Afghanistan to Pakistan to the Green Zone and back again, keep moving and they won't hit you, keep moving and you won't have to think about what you've done, what you've left behind. Genoa, she thinks she can't leave it behind, just like she couldn't leave Will behind, not really.

The death threats the past two weeks, since the retraction, have been skyrocketing, not just against Will but against all of them, and she was the one who gave the story the green light and here they are, in their home, in their newsroom, and someone is shooting at them.

(She sent Maggie to Africa and she sent Will on the air with Genoa, and God, if she isn't batting a thousand.)

_Keep moving_.

"Come on," she says, and pushes Maggie in front of her, clenching her hands tight around the curve of her shoulders and pushing Maggie through as it starts up again, and she knows the shooter can see them, and her name is on her office, but the door is thick wood with a sturdy lock on it, they just need to get through—

Maggie stumbles into Don, who catches her and pulls her out of the doorway, and then Mac's through as well and she slams her back against the door, and it closes with a loud, resounding _thwack_. Fumbling, she reaches back and turns the lock.

_Safe._

"Are you okay?" she asks, tilting her head back up against the door, trying to catch her breath. "Maggie, honey?"

The only sound in the tiny bathroom is her harsh breathing, the soft sound of the air vent going, and her blood pounding in her ears. Mac settles the back of her head against the door, and looks down at Jim.

Who is staring at her, horrified.

"What?" she asks, adrenaline flooding from her veins almost all at once. "Jim, _what_?"

"Mac," he answers cautiously, taking a step towards her. "You're bleeding."

She looks down, trying to brace one of her hands against the door knob for support. The other slides against the door, her sweat-slick palm giving her no traction against the finished wood. She looks down, first noticing how bloody and cut-up her feet are, and then—

"Oh."

She is.

She's bleeding.

Jim's hands come up under her elbows, and Mac watches blood spread out across the right side of her abdomen, soaking through cream-colored silk. Belatedly, she realizes she's been shot, the pain scorching across her stomach with the visual comprehension of what's just happened, her thighs quivering, going weak, her diaphragm spasming in agony and pressing oxygen out of her mouth, heaving hard wheezes out of her lungs. She's been shot. She's been _shot_.

He catches her as she slides down the door to the tile floor while Don and Maggie helplessly look on.

They've been here before, after all, her and Jim. They've been here before. They've reported things, gotten people killed, gotten people hurt. Fuck, she was one of them.

_Genoa_, she thinks. _You can't leave it behind._ The last time she fucked up this bad, fucked Will over this bad, she got stabbed. And even though Will's been insistent that this isn't her fault, that she's not to blame—it only makes sense that Genoa, fucking over this many people, would leave her bleeding out in her own office. Jim pulls her into his arms, loops his forearms under her armpits and drags her away from the door, to the far wall.

(There's a distant sound, like filtered through water or blood, of glass shattering, someone screaming. Mac thinks it might be Maggie.)

"I'm sorry," she says mindlessly, voice heightened in pitch by the little breaths whistling up and down her throat. "I'm so, so, sorry."

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	2. Chapter Two

**A/N: **Thanks to everyone who showed interest and left comments and kudos on the last chapter! And like I said in my last author's note... this is my stand-in for a NaNo, so this isn't going to be a short story by any means. So I hope you're in this for the long haul! And like it says in the summary, this story is going to be pretty Mac-centric. Obviously other people will appear and other POVs will be used, but all roads lead to MacKenzie on this one.

I'm going to try to start replying to reviews in a few moments. I really appreciate everything you guys have to say, but shout-out to **myragumm**, **Ellie 5192**,** Tripple-A-Plus**, **MoonlightGardenias**, **Sarah**, **Chloe83**, and **dandoan** for leaving reviews on chapter one.

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**CHAPTER TWO**

* * *

This is not supposed to be happening. This isn't supposed to be—and not to Mac, for the love of fuck, not Mac. This has already happened to Mac. This is supposed to be happening to someone nameless, faceless, because he can't carry Mac out of here like he did last time.

But it's happening.

It's happening, and he needs to handle it, because Mac can't fucking _die_, and Jim's been here before but that was thousands of miles away and this is _New York City_, not a goddamn motherfucking warzone. They're locked in Mac's bathroom and there are still gunshots ringing out and Jesus-fucking-Christ Mac has been _shot_.

And he needs to do something about it.

(He _did _something about it, last time. Carried her out of the riot, listening to blood gurgling into her mouth, to the army medic, held her tightly in lieu of a seatbelt as they were driven block after block to a whitewashed surgical center. She had called out for Will, then, asking Jim that in the case that she_, if she died_, to call Billy and tell her she was sorry and honestly, Jim is an investigative reporter and why the fuck couldn't he put it together that Billy was Will McAvoy and called his assistant and given them what-for to get him over the line so she could say it to him before she was wheeled away into surgery?

—they'd all be in very different places right now, and the abstractness of it hurts Jim's head a little too much at the moment to think of it, when he needs to be focused and singular and here, present for this, so he tamps down on the thought.)

Jim forces himself to take a breath, adjust Mac in his arms. "You're okay," he murmurs, low and steady, trying not to freak the fuck out at the sight of blood seeping through her blouse at an alarming rate. "You're all right." Slowly, gently, he lies her down on the floor, before looking up at Don and Maggie. And then remembers. "The first aid kit is in the kitchen."

(_Last time_, after, Jim put himself through every first aid and triage class he could find, so that he'd never have to stand there, rooted to the peeling linoleum floor, watching helplessly, ever again. And Mac's trained him in everything else he's ever needed to know, anyway, so he could do this for her.)

"You can't go out there," Mac wheezes, in a rush. And _fuck_, Jim thinks, looking at her. She's pale, face drawn, tight with pain, and he thinks, he _knows_, that if the bullets stop, he'll go out there. "Jim—no."

"Mac," he pleads, shrugging out of his jacket and balling it under her head. Maybe security will be able to take down the gunman soon. Maybe they won't have to stay here longer than a few minutes. Maybe the chips will come down on their side, this time. "All we've got in here is toilet paper and some towels."

"The gunman's still out there, Jim," Don echoes, sounding more steady than he looks, taking off his own jacket and handing it to him, leaning Maggie up against the wall where she looks paralyzed, frozen in fear and shock as gunshot after gunshot continues to ring out. More glass shatters, and she covers her mouth with her hands.

All Jim can think is that he went through a riot to get to Mac the last time. He can cross the newsroom to get to the kitchen. The gunman has to leave the floor eventually.

He takes her pulse. It thunders under his index and middle fingers, and he thinks he's never been more grateful for anything in his life.

"Yeah," Jim concedes, for the moment, leaning over Mac to open the cabinet under her sink, pulling out hand towels. "_Yeah._" He looks down at her, folding a towel into a tight square.

He doesn't know whether or not he's praying for an exit wound, a clean break, or—but he has to be ready. He knows how to be ready. He knows how to stand by, Mac trained him how to stand by, and he's going to stand by her for.

GSW to the right flank, could be in her liver, or pancreas, or her lung, he doesn't know the angle of impact and maybe it was a semi-automatic but maybe it went through the glass wall and slowed down and maybe it hasn't even breached the abdominal cavity.

"This is gonna hurt, remember?"

"I remember," Mac whispers, because the knife hadn't been left in, the assailant had taken it with him and they've been here before. Don comes around to kneel behind her head, looking frightened and Jim keeps telling himself that he was trained well, making quick work of Mac's shirt, tugging the hemline out of her skirt and unbuttoning it, pushing up the camisole she's wearing underneath up under the bottom of her breasts and rolling the hem tight.

_Fuck_.

It's been a long, long time since he's seen a gunshot wound in person and just, _fuck, _really, and _why Mac? _as if she didn't already suffer enough.

"You ready?" He stares down at her, sliding his hands tentatively under her hips. Mac bites her lip, forcing her face to slacken out of the fierce grip of pain, and nods. Jim looks back up at Don. "I need you to brace her shoulders. We need to see if there's an exit wound." And then back down to Mac. "You need something to bite on?"

She shakes her head determinedly, and Jim notes that she's getting paler by the minute, sweat dotting her forehead. Something has him put his hand on her forehead, sweeping her bangs off of her face.

"On the count of three. One, two—"

On three they lift her, and turn her so she's leaning more on her left side than her right, and Jim wrenches Mac's blouse down her arms and whips it away from her body, before lying it flat under her with the towel and lying her back down onto the floor.

(Sterile field, bullshit. There's blood everywhere and he's trying not to see it, to look past it until it doesn't exist. Keep moving.)

"How bad?" she gasps, squeezing her eyes shut. _Shit. Shit. _He runs one of the towels under tap water, folding it over and placing it across her forehead, trying to ignore Don's panicked stare.

"No exit. Your liver might have caught it." At least Jim hopes so. Shit. At least if it's in her liver he won't have to worry about her drowning in her own blood on her bathroom floor. He looks at the wound again, measuring it out with his fingers. The entry wound is as wide as from the tip of his thumb to his knuckle, but the diameter of scorched flesh is an inch or two wider. A .45 caliber round Jim thinks, maybe. Maybe Mac was far enough away for it to make a difference.

"Hey, Maggie?" he asks, turning to look up at her. Her eyes flutter to him, a little unfocused. "You with me?"

"Ye—yeah."

Jim nods up at the sink, where a stack of paper Dixie cups sit on the ledge. "I'm gonna need you to start filling up those little cups with water." Not really, but it might be best to have Maggie doing something so she doesn't panic, and irrigating the entry wound might help Mac out a little in the long run.

It'd be better if they had a water bottle, but they don't.

_Keep moving._

"I can do that." Maggie extracts herself from the wall, nodding jerkily.

He turns back to Don. "Call 911—"

"They already know about the shooting, I mean, there are over eighty people on this floor—"

"—and tell them that we've got a white female in her late thirties in the executive producer's office with a GSW to her right flank. Vitals stable. That way they know to come here first."

"Right, right," Don says with a nod, patting down his pockets for his cell phone. "Fuck, um…"

"I grabbed Mac's, accidentally—" Jim starts. He had just grabbed the first thing he had seen before hitting the deck.

"Yeah, use mine," Mac says quietly, gesturing weakly with her hand, laying limp at her side, towards where her BlackBerry sits on top of the toilet seat. She mutters the lock code, before turning her eyes back to Jim. "You're not worried about towel fibers?"

"Toilet paper might be a worse bet." He feels a bit of relief, only a little, when she nods in agreement. Jim starts to unbutton his blood-stained dress shirt. "I'll use this as a first layer though. How are you feeling? Hot still? Cold?"

"Hot. Light-headed."

MacKenzie's phone begins to vibrate.

"Nauseous?"

"Fuck," Jim hears Don say behind him. Sitting back on his heels, he turns to look at the screen that Don is holding out to him.

"What is it?" Mac asks faintly.

_Incoming call from… Will McAvoy. _

She's a lot more cogent than she had been after the stabbing, although Jim figures that's because the bullet is probably stopping up most of the hemorrhaging so she's not experiencing the same amount blood loss. (Yet, he tries not to think. Moving her had been a bad call, but all he could think was to get her away from the door. The bullet lodged below her ribcage might be the only thing keeping her alive right now.) He can hear her in his head, and she glares at him with more purpose than she should be able to have at the moment.

_I swear to God, Jim, if you ever try to be a hero again I'm gonna pummel your ass with a baseball bat. _

_That's two you owe me, Mac, _he had said back.

Third time's the charm.

"Will's calling you." Jim shifts his weight from his heels back to his knees, watching Mac's eyes go even wider, her thoughts spinning out of control behind them. "What do you want to do?"

She takes a moment, not really considering but trying to calm the rising anxiety on her face. _God fucking dammit_, Jim thinks. She's not going to—

"Don't answer it."

* * *

"She's not picking up." The thought gets picked up and then spun around again and again to the forefront his mind on repeat. After the sixth ring it goes to voicemail, and Will keeps the phone to his ear for a moment longer just to hear her voice tell him that this is MacKenzie McHale, and if he leaves a message she'll get back to him as soon as possible.

He looks up at Charlie's concerned face. "It went to voicemail."

"She might not have her phone, Will." He can't tell how much Charlie believes of that. The vision of Mac, lying on her back in the bullpen like a marionette with its strings cut, blood fanning out from her dark hair, eyes open, unseeing—

Mac, alone, curled under a desk, blood seeping through her fingers as she presses them over a gaping bullet hole in her belly—

Mac, reckless and unthinking of consequences, on her knees in front of the shooter, bargaining for their lives, until he levels the barrel at her forehead, or smashes in her temple with the butt of his gun—

Sloan grabs his arm, trying to shake him out of the visions that are cycling through his head from where he's leaning against his bathroom wall, Charlie and Elliot looking on worriedly. He ignores them.

"She probably just dropped her phone, Will. Mac's fine. I mean, hell, she and Jim lived this for twenty-six months."

_I didn't say it. _

Shit.

He wasn't even thinking it, until five minutes ago.

_Shit_.

If she dies—if she's already _dead_, and he didn't say, couldn't even bring himself to admit until the bullets started flying, he'll never forgive himself. And that's the kicker, isn't it?

* * *

The phone stops ringing and Mac doesn't know whether or not she should cry from relief or exhaustion. It's too much. It's too much and she can't. She picks up the phone and he's worried about her, she picks up the phone and he's reaching out from the other end of the line, she picks up the phone and he knows that she's been shot and he—what?

What does she want him to do?

(She needs him, that's the short answer.)

She feels like she's going to throw up.

(She wants him to hold her. She wants him to do a lot of things, but she wants him to hold her, like he used to, look at her like he used to, like he could carry her through, she needs him to carry her through. And he's been, since Genoa. Day and after and she wants more, and Mac doesn't know if that makes her a shitty person or not, if his friendship isn't enough, or if it isn't enough right now because she's got a bullet in her side and she's trying so hard not to cry that her chest feels like it's on fire.)

Its okay, she tells herself. Because it has to be. She's been here before. She'll be okay.

(She's shaking, and everything fucking hurts, and Maggie's gone completely white and hasn't said three words strung together since this started, and if she worries about Maggie then she'll have something to focus on besides how fucking cold her bathroom floor is, and even though that feels great at the moment because she's sweating and her face is scorching, it doesn't detract from the fact that she's been shot and she's terrified and—

_Breathe in, breathe out._)

She listens to Don calling dispatch, trying to take his words and make it seem like they apply to someone else, anyone but her.

"Hey," Jim says, gently touching her face, directing her line of sight back to him. "I need to irrigate before I start applying dressings. You're gonna be okay, Mac, the police will be here any minute and—what is it?"

She follows his line of sight back to Don, who has the speaker of her cell phone pressed against his lips, brow furrowed.

"Don?" she asks, nausea rising with the look on his face.

He looks like he's unsure if he should speak, licking his lips to buy time. "The building's on lockdown. They can't get us out of here any time soon."

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	3. Chapter Three

**A/N: **Thank you for the response to chapter two! I'm so glad you're all enjoying the story. Warnings for vague allusions to child abuse in this chapter. Thus far, I'm sticking with the schedule of posting once a day (which I should, _should _being the operative word, be able to keep up with until halfway through the month, which is when I start having papers and such due again, at which point updates may be a bit more spread out) which I'm glad of.

Thanks to (I swear to god I'm going to reply to you all individually, fanfiction was just down last night and today was busy for me) **myragumm**, **dandoan**, **Raspberry Not Pink**, **MoonlightGardenias**, **Don't Anticipate**, **Kate**, **Cellist5423**, **Eternally Romantic**, **Emeinthetardis**, **ally02**, and **TheGingerGuineaPig **for reviewing chapter two! And thanks to everyone who has favorited and followed the story, as well!

* * *

**CHAPTER THREE**

* * *

"What do you mean _they can't get us out of here any time soon_?" Maggie asks, her words clumped together by nerves and terrified outrage, escaping her mouth in half-formed sibilants and crushed vowels.

Don places the phone back down onto the counter with an overly-careful kind of motion, and then scrubs his face with his hands. "They can't locate the shooter. I mean, do you know how many floors this building has—"

"No."

"Yeah, neither do I." He chokes off a sardonic little laugh. "The police are setting up a barricade. They've called in SWAT and shut off the elevators. We don't even know how many shooters were involved—"

"Just… the one," Mac wheezes, eyes squeezed shut.

Maggie doesn't know how Mac's still awake. Maggie doesn't know how Mac ran back out for her, or why she did it, or how she, how—she's not processing any of this at all, not at all, it's been ten minutes maybe, probably less, and if she processes this as it's happening Maggie thinks she'll lose it all together that this is happening _again, _and really, didn't she and Mac already use up their shares of bad luck? Hasn't everyone, with Jerry Dantana, with Genoa?

"On _this_ floor," Jim says, like he's thinking of something else.

They're all thinking it, Maggie knows. This is retribution for Genoa. Will and Mac have tried to keep secret the fact that the amount of death threats that _News Night_ receives has gone up since the retraction, but the extra security lurking around the front entrance and the metal detectors hasn't been for nothing. And while Will, Mac, and Charlie have all been wandering around the office the past two weeks with the shadow of anxiety lining their faces, what with the looming threat of a law suit and federal prosecution first and second, there has always the threat to their physical safety, looming third.

And the people who got their hands dirty with Genoa don't only work on the twenty-third floor.

_Don't think about it_.

They've made a lot of people angry. And if one angry person with a gun could get in, what's to say that two couldn't, or three—

They're trapped in a tiny bathroom, and Mac is alive. She's not dead, she's not… _this isn't Daniel. Mac is alive, and breathing, and talking. _Mac is strong. Mac spent three years in a warzone and three years putting it to rights with Will, which Maggie thinks has often been almost like a warzone of its own kind, really. Mac has been stabbed and Mac has faced down enemy insurgents and Mac has faced the fallout out from Genoa and failed relationships and—

Mac's pretty tough. And Mac has got to live through this, Maggie thinks, because she's not worth dying for. Mac's life isn't a fair trade for her own, and she knows it.

"Fair," Mac concedes.

And then Maggie notices that the gunshots have stopped, even though her brain keeps registering their echo.

_Pop. Pop-pop. Pop. _

"What did they say to do?" Maggie asks, wrapping her arms around her middle, as if it'll keep her fear from bleeding out, as if she can keep her wriggling insides from escaping and that if she just holds her elbows a little tighter, she can force down her panic and be tough. They were all shot at. Mac, Jim, and Don were able to dust themselves off and get off the floor. She wasn't, and Mac got shot. She has to do this, now. She has to be tough. "Dispatch—what did they say to do?"

They are trapped in a tiny bathroom, and this is what she has to focus on. This is what she can control. These are the people she can help.

"Dispatch said that they're going to clear the building floor by floor," Don answers, and Maggie wonders if anyone's going to ask why Mac told them to ignore the call from Will. (She wonders why Jim ignored her calls, and then thinks that Mac and Jim might not be so dissimilar after all. She doesn't entirely know what that means, but Mac dated Wade when she was clearly in love with Will. Maggie doesn't know what to think about that, either.) "They said… we have to wait."

"We can't wait." She gestures at Mac. "We can't—did you tell them that we can't wait?"

"I told them." His voice rises in pitch, eyes going wide in that incredulous way of his. "And they said that they can't move more than a floor at a time. We'll be the first people out on this floor. But until then, they can't risk everyone's safety."

"Are you serious—"

"No, they're right." Maggie looks down and Mac is looking right at her. She guesses there must be a look of shock, or something, on her face because Mac softens and hardens her expression at the same time; sympathetic, but unwilling to yield. She's seen it on Mac's face a thousand times before, but never like this. "They can't risk the lives of thousands of people because one person has been shot."

"The first aid kit is only in the kitchen," Jim says, somewhat out of the blue, although Maggie's sure it won't be once he finishes verbalizing his train of thought. "If we have to wait, I'm going to use sterile dressings, latex gloves. We go out, and we go out once, grab everything we need—"

"No, Jim—"

"Yes, good idea—"

Mac and Don chorus, Don nodding vehemently.

"Jim," Mac says in that particular tone of voice Maggie's noticed she reserves solely for Jim, or often Will, when they won't do what she wants them to and she's particularly aggrieved and convinced of her correctness. (It's almost like a whine, but Maggie thinks too highly of Mac to call it whining.) "I said no."

"They've stopped," Maggie says, nodding herself now, and Jim looks back to her. (It feels good to have Jim looking at her like this again, like he believes in her.) "They stopped shooting."

She went back for Daniel. She can get the first aid kit for Mac.

Mac was the one who believed in her first.

"Maybe they moved on to another floor," Don says in agreement, pacing what little space he has to pace, rubbing his bottom lip with his middle finger.

"Or maybe they're just reloading," Mac mutters, tentatively lifting her left arm to wipe her eyes. "You know, since they were firing at us with a semiautomatic rifle, I'm sure that he knew what he was doing here, which floor is the _News Night_ newsroom—"

"The longer we wait the worse it'll be," Jim says, catching Mac's hand and putting it back down at her side and looking to Don. "We go—"

"We?" Maggie tries to keep animosity out her voice. She knows that Jim will want her to stay behind.

"Don and I."

"You're the one who knows first aid, though. You should stay. Just in case…" It seems horrible to say it with Mac laying on the floor, and fuck, there's so much blood and it's just… _fuck_, there's a lot of blood. "Don and I should go."

"I swear to God," Mac mutters, lifting her hand again, "if I get killed by a weapon I've advocated the banning of my entire journalistic career… one of you has to—"

"You're not going to die," Maggie assures her, trying to keep her voice from shaking on that front. "You're not."

"It'll be one way to change Will's stance on gun control laws."

"Mac!" Jim half-shouts, grabbing her hand firmly and placing it down over her belly button. For a brief moment he looks panicked, but it slips back under the surface of controlled calm almost as quickly as it appeared.

(Maggie wonders what it means—Mac will joke about her own death, in the context of Will, but won't answer the phone. It probably means the same thing as Mac being willing to take a bullet to pull Maggie out of the line of fire, but being completely unwilling to let anyone else do the same for herself.)

"I'm just saying," she counters, visibly tiring. Any energy she had garnered fighting with them leaves her, leaving her paler than before. Jim squeezes her hand, the blood on his own leaving her fingers tinged red when he pulls his away. "Dammit, Jim," she adds weakly, "I said not to be a hero."

Jim snorts. "_Mac_."

"Right," she murmurs, in a way that suggests should would be sheepish were she not lying on the floor in a steadily-amassing pool of her own blood. "And _none of you are going out there_. I don't care if—"

"You're not really in a position to stop us." Don plops down onto the toilet seat, lifting his eyebrows at Mac. His voice is an attempt at light-hearted, but is anchored by a tendril of steadfast determination.

Maggie remembers once, how Mac, during one of their round-for-rounds, had shouted at Will that the staff would walk through fire for him, and Will had shot back that it'd be for _her_. It had been an abstract thought at the time, but _yes_, she had thought at the time. She'd walk through fire for Mac, and Will too, she had thought.

And then Africa.

She thinks she'll still do it, even though she knows what it means, now.

Mac did it for her.

And Mac knew what it would mean, too.

"We're going." She licks her lips. "Don and I, we'll go. Mac, if we're gonna be here awhile then we need to minimize the chance of infection. Jim, you have to stay here."

Jim looks at her, and she wishes he was looking at her like he was just a few minutes ago.

"I can do this," she says, slowly.

"Okay," he says, like he only half believes her. But enough not to question her. Maggie thinks that might be what believing in someone might be, anyway.

(If only she could turn back the clock.)

(Just like Jerry.)

They're going.

* * *

He didn't find out until almost two weeks after the fact that Mac had been stabbed in Islamabad. He remembers sitting in Charlie's office, waiting for Charlie to get off the phone with someone, and Charlie sighing, gently replacing the phone on the receiver.

And how he'd prefaced the whole thing—

_She's going to be okay_.

He doesn't know if Mac's okay.

And the thing is—

Will McAvoy is a man who spent his entire childhood throwing himself between his father and his brother, his father and his mother, his father and his sisters. He knows how to take a hit, even if his self-esteem is his personal glass jaw, he can take a hit, from just about anyone, whether it's John McAvoy or a Northwestern lineman, he can _take it_. And he can hit back harder, even now with two bad knees and a rotten elbow, he still remembers how to drop his shoulder and—

(The only thing he's ever learned from love is how to hit back harder.)

He needs to know that Mac is okay.

Sloan's slid down to the floor, tugged him down with her and tucked her head under his arm—and took his BlackBerry away, which he realizes is probably good but he's well aware he could overpower her for it, and won't, shouldn't. He hears her sniffling quietly, and it's nothing to turn his head and press a kiss into her hair.

(This isn't one of John McAvoy's drunken rampages, and it isn't Fiona's blonde curls, but they all still have shadows creeping under the door to fear.)

He's watching Charlie talk on the phone to the police chief down outside the building. Charlie's awfully calm, which Will supposes is a credit to five years in the service and five more reporting on the Vietnam War. It's uneasy, for him. He learned how to fear silence more than the rage a long time ago.

"What did he say?" he asks once Charlie has ended the call and taken the phone away from his face.

Charlie opens his mouth half a second before he speaks. "There are a lot of causalities, but as of right now no one knows where the gunman is. No one's making any calls from any floor about a location, so he might have gone into hiding."

"Or he's just standing out in the bullpen, deciding who to pick off first." Will starts stroking Sloan's hair, mostly as a comfort to himself.

Charlie frowns down at him, but it's not like it's a secret where anyone was when the guy started shooting—he had a disguise, he probably took a minute to case the bullpen before spraying his staff with bullets.

"It's more likely he knows that the police are here," Charlie says.

Will sighs, and nods, leaning his head back against the wall.

_A lot of causalities. _

"What did he say about causalities?"

"Two dead security guards at the service entrance, and a third from the service elevator was taken to Presbyterian a few minutes ago."

"Was he conscious?" Elliot asks, stretching his legs out along the floor, looking up from what Will guesses is another text from his wife.

"No."

"Anything about Mac?" Sloan asks, her voice a bit muffled.

Charlie's face shutters. "No."

* * *

**Thanks for reading! **


	4. Chapter Four

**A/N: **Sorry this is so late, or, um... early. _College_. Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter. This one got a bit long... so I had to move some of what I wanted to write at the end to the next chapter, so I hope it doesn't come off as unfinished. I have an exam tomorrow (meaning Wednesday) so I'm not certain if I'll get to updating before later Wednesday, but I will certainly try my best.

Shout outs to: **Sarah**,** Tripple-A-Plus**,** awesomesausome**,** Raspberry Not Pink**,** myragumm**,** dandoan**,** TheGingerGuineaPig**, and** MoonlightGardenias** for reviewing the last chapter. And thanks to everyone who has followed/favorited. You guys are awesome!

* * *

**CHAPTER FOUR**

* * *

_White female, late thirties, twenty-third floor. Executive producer's bathroom. GSW to the right flank_.

It's MacKenzie.

He knows its MacKenzie. It's MacKenzie and that's why she's not picking up her phone, and probably why they can't reach Jim either, because Charlie does not believe for a single moment that Jim would abandon Mac and doesn't believe that Mac would let anyone outside those immediately necessary know that she's been shot. Mac is smart enough to want to keep panic and helplessness contained.

And Mac knows—maybe not consciously, but at least somewhere in the swaths of denial that she wraps her psyche in—and _he_ knows that absolutely nothing could keep Will from getting to her if he knew she had been shot. The idiot couldn't come to conscious realization (or rather, pull his head out of his ass and realize) that he's forgiven her, maybe forgave her a while ago, but Charlie has no doubt in his mind that Will McAvoy would walk through a very non-proverbial hail of bullets to get to MacKenzie McHale's side.

_Vitals stable_.

He has to take a moment to remind himself that it could be worse. He has no idea how he managed to keep his face straight on the phone when he pieced it together, the sudden heavy understanding, but he's been in this business for almost forty years now. He'd better be a damn good actor by now.

"And a white male, mid-twenties, took a round to the shoulder," he continues. That could be any number of the young men on the _News Night _staff. "They've gotten a call from a group of the staff who were able to get to the kitchen and put the table against the door for cover."

"How many?" Even scared out of his mind for MacKenzie, Will's staff is still… his staff. And by god, if Will isn't a protector at the core.

"The Police Chief said sixteen, but it could me more." He hadn't gotten as much of a good look as he would have liked to before hitting the deck, but he knows there are enough hidey-holes in the bullpen that people could have feasibly ducked for cover behind a fucking copy machine and made it through all right. "People are gonna start crawling out of wherever they hid, trying to find a locked door to get behind." The staff bathrooms, the kitchen, supply room.

Will licks his lips, nodding. "Any other injuries?"

"Concussion, probably someone who hit their head trying to get under their desk. Graze wounds."

"Is anybody dead?" Elliot asks, gripping his cell phone tight.

"Not that we know of." Charlie's eyes flicker back to Will. "Not unless we go out there to see for ourselves, which absolutely _none of us _is going to do."

Will looks back at him with what Charlie suspects is a purposefully blank look in eyes, which evaporates quickly when one of the cell phone's cradled in Sloan's lap goes off. Sloan fumbles between them, before handing Will's his, a guilty look on her face.

"It's your sister," she murmurs, the sin of the text message not being from Mac weighing down on her tongue. The brief flame of hope that lit up Will's face is extinguished just as quickly as its allowed to melt his taut features.

"What about my staff?" Elliot asks while Will responds his sister. "Anything about my floor? I haven't been able to get ahold of Don."

"Don… was down here," Sloan interjects uneasily.

"What?"

"I saw him maybe twenty minutes ago, talking to Mac outside her office." She looks at each of them individually before continuing. "With um, Jim. Don was… he was down here."

Charlie figures that out of all the people in ACN, Jim and Don are probably the most loyal to Mac, outside Will and himself. Jim, maybe more so. Ad Jim's with Mac, and it's a hell of a comforting thought. Charlie knows that the kid has first aid experience, knows how to handle himself under this kind of pressure. Better than Will could, where Mac's concerned. Jim's with Mac, Jim made the call. And he can't imagine that Mac would let Don be left behind. Hell, Charlie thinks, trying not to let it show on his face, Mac probably took the bullet for one of them.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Elliot says, groaning.

"I'm afraid not." Sloan looks like she wants to bury her face in Will's arm, and Will looks like he'd be inclined to let her, even with his gaze still fixated on his BlackBerry. "I keep trying to remember," she says a moment later, "where everyone was standing, I keep trying to… to piece together where the shooter aimed first, and I can't—I can't remember."

"Right to left," Will murmurs, still typing. He looks down briefly at Sloan. "The shooter was aiming from right to left. Aiming for the offices. Not that that… makes any of us _feel_ better, but I'm assuming the aim was my office or Mac's. Which is why it doesn't make sense that no one's tried to shoot the door handle off yet."

"Or it was just pray and spray," Charlie rasps.

Will looks up again. "Yeah. Maybe."

"Right to left gives Mac and Don and Jim time to duck." Elliot says, trying to believe it. "I mean, hey, it looks like sixteen people had time to duck."

_Not MacKenzie_, Charlie thinks, looking at Will.

Maybe Mac didn't pick up her phone not because she dropped it, but because she knows just as well as he does that Will would, come hell or high water or gunman or maniac with a fucking bazooka gun, get to her. Fuck, he saw the man the morning he found out Mac had been stabbed, and he hated her more than he loved her back then, and even _then_ he'd almost gotten on a plane to Germany until Charlie told him that Mac had been almost ready to be discharged and shipped back to Pakistan.

And the thirty feet between their offices is a hell of a lot closer than Landstuhl, Germany.

* * *

"Right there, right back," Jim says, his hands still bracing her head. Mac supposes it's to keep himself from pressing his hands over the gunshot wound when he could be minutes away from latex gloves and sterile gauze. Mac can appreciate that, but it's also getting to the point where she really wishes there was some damn pressure on the fucking thing, not just because she's bleeding out but because she thinks it would actually fucking hurt less.

"Yeah," Don answers, nodding curtly.

"Scope out the room first, before you move. Play dead if the shooter comes back." Mac can tell that the last half of that is directed to Maggie. So can Maggie, who to her own credit, doesn't scowl, just nods.

Mac clears her throat. "If you're worried about your face not being convincing, just plant it in the carpet. Put yourself under something and hope they don't trip over you."

Well, these are skills she had sincerely hoped to never use again. She had also sincerely hoped to never be on her back bleeding out again, but _here they are. _She smiles up at Don and Maggie the best she can manage, trying not to crane her neck or strain her abdominal muscles. "Thank you. Both."

"So you've come around on this?" Don asks, brow furrowed.

She huffs a sardonic little laugh, and immediately regrets it. "No, but I also can't get up and stop you, can I? Just please don't—"

She doesn't know how to finish that without sounding like a bloody hypocrite, so she doesn't. She thinks they get it, though, when Maggie tucks her hair behind her ear and nods to her shoes. _You don't owe me anything_, Mac wants to tell her. _This is my newsroom. Genoa was my story to run. I was the one who sent you to Africa. You don't owe me a single goddamn thing, Margaret Jordan. _

_They'd walk through fire for you_, Will had said.

She doesn't want that. She wants them to do their jobs, and go home at the end of the day. She doesn't want—

They'd trusted her, and look where it got them.

_That was their first mistake, Mac! They trusted you! _Will had said that, too.

(She doesn't want to think about the bodies Don and Maggie might stumble upon out there. She doesn't want to think about it. She doesn't want to think about everyone in the bullpen, about how Maggie was the only one she went back for.)

_She's like me, before I grew into myself. _

God, isn't that a curse?

"We'll be back," Maggie says with almost too much conviction. It sounds lacquered and fake and Mac knows the feeling.

Her perfect, brave, wonderful staff. She wishes, for more than a lingering moment, that she had taught them to be cowards.

(She's not sure if she quite means it, or if it's the bullet wriggling about in her gut, but Mac is really quite terrified and is afraid of showing it, is afraid she's not the same woman who walked willingly into a war zone six years ago with bright young journalistic minds in tow. She's not a brave, either. Or maybe reckless, with her life or anyone else's. Not that she had let anyone be a hero back then, either.

She's afraid of what valuing her own life might mean.)

"I'll grab my phone when I'm out there, if I can," Don adds. He and Maggie lock eyes for a moment, before deciding tacitly to open the door. Paying no mind to his evident nerves, he cracks it open, peering around it before looking back. "All clear." He takes a breath before finishing. "From here, anyway. I'll text you with updates. If I can get my—"

"Right," Jim says, nodding.

They slip out the door, shutting it quietly behind them, leaving only the sound of her own compromised breathing in their wake. Before—

"Hey Jim?"

"Yeah?" he answers, looking down at her one last time, like she'd disappear or something, before standing up to lock the door again.

"Did you keep the bullet?" It's a random question, but she knows he'll catch on, even if she's not quite sure why she's asking it. "From when—"

"From when I was shot in the ass? Yeah." He smiles at her. _Don't be a hero_, plays over and over again in her mind. She should kick his ass, but at least he took orders this time and didn't come running after her. Her beloved, loyal, James Harper. "_You _were the one who asked the medic for it."

"You deserved a trophy." She smiles back up at him.

He rolls his eyes, kneeling back down beside her. Mac thinks the tile floor is going to start hurting his knees. Her own back is killing her, but she's not exactly the best judge of what is and isn't comfortable at the moment.

It's almost like being back in Afghanistan. She can joke, with Jim. Their time embedded is a complicated secret. And Mac thinks that if she doesn't laugh, she'll examine it all too closely. She won't do it in front of Maggie, though.

"And yet you said you were going to pummel me with a blunt object."

"It was a baseball bat, if I recall correctly," she wheezes. She is. She is recalling correctly, because she'd never been half afraid in her life as when Jim took a bullet for her, even if it was in his ass. He'd gotten lucky. "And I do."

"When they," he gestures to her middle, as if it wasn't slowly being lathered in her own blood, and a sudden chill sweeps up Mac's spine, painful and electric. Jim stops, for maybe half a beat, rubbing his hands up and down her arms. "You know, do you want to keep it?"

Sweet, sweet Jim. He'd reminded her of Will, in a way, when she'd first met him in Atlanta. And he'd begged to follow her to Afghanistan, to stop rotting away at CNN, and she had said yes. Had to have said yes.

Her smile turns sweetly mocking. "I'd like a trophy."

"You could get Will to get it turned into a necklace, or something. Or have it bronzed." He frowns thoughtfully, tilting his head in fake consideration. "You've taken my .22 round and raised it a semiautomatic. Put it right next to your Peabodies."

"In between them," she murmurs. And thinks, _good_, she won't be getting a Peabody for Genoa, because even though she'd—she'd feared that was Jerry's ambition, and that he'd do anything for a Peabody. But she thinks she might have, too, once the story was coming along. Once the story was something that seemed believable.

It had been another thing on the laundry list of how to get Will to forgive her. How to get Will to love her again. How to put Will's life back together.

(Win Will McAvoy a Peabody, and she'd be worthy.)

Instead, she'd broken it.

Her phone sounds off again; two quick vibrations that buzz sharply against the toilet lid. Jim reaches for it.

"Is it Don? Where are they?"

Jim fumbles with the phone, freezing over her.

"What is it?" _God, not another thing. No… _

"It's an email. From Will."

"What?"

_No, that doesn't… _

(It does. It does make sense, for Will, but not for her. Because Will has been sweet since it's happened and he would, he would keep trying, keep reaching out, but this is too much like old Will, like too much like before, and she's fucked everything up too much to deserve that. He used to be willing to go to the moon and back for her without her so much as asking, and she doesn't deserve that. She'd been so afraid of it, then. Only after she'd… only after, she'd been so sure that she wanted it. But now, after Genoa, she isn't sure if she's running to Will or away from him.)

"I guess he really wants to know if you're okay." His thumb hovers over the keypad. "Do you want me to open it?"

She can't really breathe deeply, and the little breaths she's been taking are finally catching up with her all at once, which Mac thinks may be because she's trying very hard not to cry.

"Sure."

If she's going to lose her shit, might as well do it around Jim.

He looks for a moment like he's going to read it out loud to her, but then reconsiders, and holds the screen to her face. It takes a moment to level in her line of sight, and then—

_Mac, _

_Just let me know you're okay. I'm flipping the fuck out here, hiding in the bathroom with Charlie, Sloan, and Elliot. Please just… I don't even know why you might see this. Maybe you can't talk where you are, or you dropped your phone and you might want to check your email on someone else's. I don't fucking know, MacKenzie, just send up a flare. Please. _

_I need to know you're okay, because I'm sitting here like a fucking moron, thinking about a million things that could have happened to you. We all just got shot at, and I all can think of is you, and if that's not something I don't know what is, and I just keep thinking, over and over again, about how I never said, I never even thought—_

Her phone vibrates again in Jim's hand, the screen flashing. Mac gulps hard, diverting her eyes for a moment before she's able to look back at the screen.

_One new text message from… Don Keefer. _

"It's from Don, open it." She tries to ignore how her voice sounds clogged with emotion, is thankful that Jim does, even though he started to read the email and decided it was too personal, and—

(Too much.)

"He says the floor is clear. They're gonna make a go of it," he says evenly. Deliberately so. "Do you want to—?"

"No," she answers quickly.

"Mac." His voice isn't quite pleading. "Tell him you're okay, or—"

_Don't cry_.

"Or what, Jim?"

He sighs. "Did you get to finish reading it?"

"Yes."

_No. _

She's bleeding out already. Mac isn't sure if she could withstand bleeding out emotionally, too. Jim looks down at her, pursing his lips in sympathy. Pain washes over her in another wave, acute and gripping. He drops the phone in favor of holding her arms, keeping her from moving too much.

He was there the first time.

He remembers.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	5. Chapter Five

**A/N: **Sorry for the delay! I had an exam this morning in Human Geography (which my adviser totally lied about being a GPA booster, by the way) and I just didn't have the time to finish this chapter last night, since apparently my "oh, I'll just write two-thousand-word chapters" guideline has been thrown out the window.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter! I'll get to replying to reviews in just a moment.

* * *

**CHAPTER FIVE**

* * *

_Jim, tell Billy I'm sorry, you have to tell him I'm sorry, if I—_and he had said _tell him yourself, Mac_, and now here they are, almost four years later. And if Mac doesn't want to face it yet, then fine, but if she dies it's going to be another thing that's happened to Will, and Jim thinks that Mac hurts people the most when she's busy trying to sabotage her own happiness.

(Thirty feet. It's thirty feet. What she'd be leaving behind is thirty feet from her.)

_Copy_, he types out and sends back to Don. God, AWM is a huge building. Maybe that was it. Maybe they've made it through to the other side, maybe now it's just a waiting game.

"Jim?"

Her voice is soft.

She's fading.

It had almost been easier, in Islamabad. It had been over so quickly that he didn't have time to think about it, didn't have time to stop. It had all spun out of control so fast, and he hadn't…

Jim resolves that if it comes to it, he'll call Will.

"They said that the bullpen is clear, so they're gonna make a go of it." He sets his jaw, clenching and unclenching his fingers. Every nerve in his body is strung tight; he feels like he could run a mile, has to resist the urge to pace this tiny space. They're cornered animals, wounded and wary. If the elevators weren't shut down he'd say they should have just made a run for the elevator. Hell, if they were on the thirteenth floor instead of the twenty-third Jim thinks he might have seen if the three of them could have made a go of getting Mac down to the ground floor themselves.

"I know, you already said that."

For the first time since this started, he thinks she looks vulnerable. And just… _fuck_, he thinks. Mac's never been afraid of much, just…

He realizes she only asked to keep him talking to her. _Oh._ He's an idiot. Slowly, he eases off his knees to sit. Picking the damp towel off her forehead, he dabs at her face, her collarbones, the gentle slope of her breastbone. _Just hang in there. Couple more minutes. _He wipes cold sweat off where he can. _A couple more minutes, and then a couple minutes more. One minute at a time._

"Are you cold?" he asks; her skin is turning grey. He thinks even her eyes have lost some of their color and the contrast between her skin and the blood steadily trickling out from the wound is almost too much.

"A little," she answers, in the same soft tone. It's almost a comfort, Jim thinks, that she can be this way in front of him.

"We'll warm you up after I get everything… you know." He gestures to her middle. "I'll text Don to grab the fire blanket if he can." The damn thing may be made of fiberglass, but it's also made of wool. Mac nods, a slight movement, letting her eyes drift shut. "Don't go to sleep," he tells her, voice cottoned by false calm.

"I feel like I'm going to vomit," she mutters.

Jim re-soaks the towel with cold water, laying it over her forehead before reaching for two more, wetting them, and laying them over the pulse points at her wrists, all before reaching for Mac's BlackBerry again and sending a message to Don, asking him for the fire blanket. It's a good idea, he thinks, trying to wrap his head around the abstract idea of how blood loss is going to make Mac hypothermic and how they're going to need to keep her temperature up any way possible until they can get fluids into her instead of actually envisioning Mac, halfway to exsanguinated on the floor, pale, cold, and unmoving.

It gets quiet enough that Jim can hear the light bulb in the overhead light whining softly.

"You should answer his email. Tell him you're fine." She sighs, and even though her eyes are still closed, he can only look at her hands. "It's why you didn't answer his call, right? Because you couldn't fake it?"

"I'd have to answer everything else he wrote, too."

"You'd have to read it, too." He knows she didn't finish. She's spent years upon years trying to get him to answer her… or has she? "…Mac?"

"What?"

"Are you running towards or away from him?"

She sighs. "I don't know anymore."

"You should read the email." It seems funny, now, in a way that it shouldn't. "I mean…"

She laughs, a small tinny noise that sounds like it's tamping down on a sob. "I see the irony, Jim," she manages eventually.

She and Will have spent the last three years in a painful holding pattern, a routine that has left the both of them skittish and the last few weeks have made it seem like the floor has given way for _all _of them, Jim can't imagine how it's been like for Mac, and now…

And now she's just in pain, and Will has… come to his senses? (Jim knows that's not quite fair, but he's unabashedly biased when it comes to Mac.)

He takes her hand. "Yeah," he says, because he can't think of anything else and this is just plain awkward, given everything.

He'll make the call, if it comes to it. Mac's made them for him too many times to count. He can do it, for her.

* * *

"Martin?" Don hears Maggie whisper from behind him. "_Martin?_"

Don pivots on his heel to see Maggie down on her knees, bent over someone's—Martin's, obviously—supine form. _Shit_. Well, he'd known that this was—well, a very distinct possibility.

"Martin?" she asks again, more urgently, shaking his shoulders.

_Shit. Shit shit shit._

"He's alive," she whispers, voice strung out a bit by anxiety, making her sound tighter, and sharper somehow. Her index and middle fingers are pressed firmly over Martin's jugular. Don forces himself to stop, lift up his head, and do a quick look around the room. No one coming; he then has to force himself to not look down, to not look for bodies. They don't have time to help everyone. And if he stumbles on anyone else, Maggie, God bless her sweet little head, will make them stop and help.

And then, with just _their_ luck, the gunman will come back and add the two of them to the pile of bodies.

"Don, I've got a pulse. He's breathing, I've got a pulse."

He gets closer, squatting down close to them. "Was he hit?"

Her hands run carefully over him, before gently palpating his skull. "I think hit his head."

"What makes you think that?" Don keeps turning his head, up, up, up, keeping his eyes on the doorways. His cell phone buzzes in his pocket again, and he silences it. One of them needs to be alert right now. Whatever it is, it can wait. He thinks this must not have hit the news yet, or barely has. His parents haven't tried to contact him, and may God help anyone if they try to stand in front of his mother to keep her from getting information on him. He fully expects her to drive in from New Jersey and make demands of her own at the police barricade.

Maggie looks up at him, keeping her hand under Martin's head. "There's a bump the size of Arkansas under my fingers."

"Any blood?"

She bites her lip, shaking her head. "Don't think so." She checks again, taking a moment longer and Don knows they have to move. "No. None. Martin?"

"Maggie, if he's been unconscious for fifteen minutes, I don't know—"

"We can't _leave him _here," she pleads. God dammit, he's never been able to resist her when she's making that stupid face at him, even if they aren't in a relationship anymore.

And well… no, they can't, not really. And he doesn't want to, but they also don't have _time_, for Mac, or for themselves, to drag Martin across the bullpen and back. And he's alive, for the time being, and quiet and unmoving. "If they think he's dead they won't hurt him."

"I can't leave him here." Like he _wants _to?

"Maggie." Triage, he thinks. This might be triage. Treat the ones you can right now. He doesn't actually know shit about triage, but Don thinks he read that somewhere along the line.

"No." But Maggie has always been stubborn.

Okay, think. He's a producer. He's a problem solver. He can solve… this problem.

"There's a closet in the kitchen," Maggie says, suddenly, looking up at him with excited wide eyes. "We put him in there, that way he's out of sight, and when dispatch calls back we tell them that's where he is."

It's a good plan. He doesn't want to admit that to her, but it's a good plan.

They also need to move.

"All right, we'll do that."

So he has to admit that.

Together they pick Martin up under his armpits, dragging him slowly across the carpet, backs hunched low and in less than a minute Don's thighs are burning but he keeps telling himself that they can't fucking stop now, that the shooter could come back any moment, that stopping could mean the loss of all momentum that they have, that it's going to take longer to get back to Mac—

But _goddamn _is Martin heavy for such a small guy.

They reach the door to the kitchen, and reach for the doorknob, and it's—

Locked.

Wait, does the kitchen door even lock?

For a brief moment, panic shoots up Don's spine, before he realizes that this is probably a good thing. Gesturing to Maggie, they lay silently agree to lay Martin down, settling him down on the carpet. Don gets his mouth as close as he can to the crack between the door and the doorway, and knocks softly.

"It's me." He really hopes he doesn't have to say it louder than that. "Guys? It's me and Maggie. We've got Martin. Open the door."

He grits his teeth, grimacing. _Please._ Glancing back at Maggie, who, to her credit, is keeping her eyes on all the entrances to the bullpen, Don raises his hand to knock again. And then, blissfully, he hears the muffled scramble of furniture being moved behind the door. It cracks open a moment later to reveal a sliver of Gary's face.

He looks immediately relieved. "Thank God, you guys."

Don smiles, somehow. "Yeah, now let us in."

The door swings open wider, and Gary helps Don get Martin in through the door.

It seems like they won't need Maggie's plan after all—the staff kitchen is filled with a large group of, well, the staff, who've gotten the table against the door and are sitting with the lights off, all with their cell phones out and all with looks of mild panic on their faces. Not that he can blame them.

"You guys all right?" Neal asks, standing from where a group of the _News Night_ senior staff has taken residence on the floor.

"Yeah, we are." Don says, glancing back at Maggie who has an anxious _we-have-to-get-the-fuck-out-of-here-but-I-didn't-e xpect-people_ type expression on her face that he thinks probably mirrors the one on his. He lowers his voice. "We need the first aid kit. To take back, to where we were hiding."

"Why?" Neal steps closer, closing the circle between the four of them. "Tess has a nasty graze, Joey took one to the shoulder." Don watches it click behind his eyes a moment later, while Maggie is trying to figure out what to say. "Who's hurt?"

Maggie opens and closes her mouth a few times.

Don puts his hands on his hips, canting his chin down to pitch his voice to the floor, but keeping his eyes between Neal and Gary. "Mac was shot. We've got her in her bathroom, Jim's there. But we've talked to the dispatch guy, and he said—"

Neal covers his mouth with a hand, shaking his head. "They're not getting to us for at least an hour. Right."

"Yeah." He's not an expert, or anything, but he's not feeling too sure about Mac's odds on lasting out an hour without any sort of medical intervention. Or maybe she can. He really doesn't fucking know but he really doesn't want to find out.

"An hour?" Maggie hisses.

Don turns to her. "I didn't want anyone to panic."

"You can't make those kinds of decisions," she says in the voice she does when she's trying very hard not to shout. Normally, Don would think it was hilarious, but—

"With Mac bleeding out on her own bathroom floor and Jim thirty seconds away from an anxiety attack, and you—being you? Yeah, I can." What the fuck was he supposed to say? _Sorry, Mac, looks like you're gonna have to hang in there for a while. Let's see how long we can keep you from dying of blood loss. _He might not know much about first aid, but he knows a shitton a lot about producing, and keeping everyone calm is generally rule number one.

"Jim needs to know that!"

"I texted him. He knows. And now we need to get back." He turns back to Gary and Martin. "First aid kit. And the fire blanket. Anything you guys got that we can take back to Jim and Mac."

"Got it," Neal says, nodding.

Gary starts to turn to go get the supplies, Don guesses, before turning back, face strained. "What are we telling the rest of the staff?"

Shit. Right.

* * *

"I should… I should answer him," she says, trying not to notice how hard it's getting to breathe, shoving down her own panic. It's actually pretty easy, when she's in this much pain. It keeps her from focusing on too much else.

Her head is in Jim's lap, and one of his hands is busy taking her pulse on her neck, the other resting on her bicep. Don and Maggie have been gone for almost twenty minutes, and she can feel him vibrating with disquiet. "Keep him from… from worrying."

"Do you want me to read it to you?"

Sweet, sweet Jim. She won't be something that happens to him.

"No, I've got it."

She hears him typing in the lock code, hears the gentle noise of her phone opening, and Jim wraps her bloodied palm around her BlackBerry, helping her hold it steady in front of her face. MacKenzie wishes that she had her glasses, but she guesses that's just the way her day is going.

(She wants to hear Will's voice enough that she's willing to finish reading the email. He's always had some preternatural way to keep her thoughts, or the room, or whatever, from spinning. She's lying on the ground and she doesn't feel grounded at all.

Or maybe, a smaller part of her believes, it's because she won't have to deal with the consequences. She's not dumb. It's been nearly half an hour since this all began. MacKenzie knows SWAT procedure. She knows how big the AWM building is. She knows she's not going anywhere if the elevators are off.

Or maybe… she's just ready to stop hurting.)

She tries to keep her eyes from blurring, from her own tears or her jerking hands or her shitty vision, she doesn't know.

(And doesn't care.)

_Mac,_

_Just let me know you're okay. I'm flipping the fuck out here, hiding in the bathroom with Charlie, Sloan, and Elliot. Please just… I don't even know why you might see this. Maybe you can't talk where you are, or you dropped your phone and you might want to check your email on someone else's. I don't fucking know, MacKenzie, just send up a flare. Please._

_I need to know you're okay, because I'm sitting here like a fucking moron, thinking about a million things that could have happened to you. We all just got shot at, and I all can think of is you, and if that's not something I don't know what is, and I just keep thinking, over and over again, about how I never said, I never even thought… it's been three years now, six, if I count your years in the Middle East, and I should._

_We've never dealt with the rubble of our relationship, or our own mistakes. Because God knows I've heaped more onto your head than you've deserved for yours. I've allowed myself to be tied down by our loose ends, instead of trying to work out what I want from you, and that's unfair. What I want from everything really, but all I know MacKenzie, is that I could spend the rest of my life away from you or I could see you every day and still spend hour after hour thinking about you, and all the things we've done wrong. But you're here. I hope you're still here, and maybe I could stop being a fucking moron and figure out how to think of all the things we've done right._

_What I'm trying to say here is that I'm sorry. And that I'm sorry it took until now for me to realize this._

_Will. _

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	6. Chapter Six

**A/N: **Did you know that if you don't sleep for 48 hours, then take a midterm, and then finish an essay, your body will hate you and you will catch a fever? (That's my backwards way of apologizing for the delay in updating.) Thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter! It's 6AM my time and I haven't gone to bed yet, so I will reply once I am once again in the world of the living. Many apologies if there are mistakes in this chapter, but I'm exhausted and my head is pounding and my sleep schedule is all thrown off from sleeping so much yesterday.

Shout outs to: **Ellie**,** myragumm**,** Tripple-A-Plus**,** Don't Anticipate**,** Eternally Romantic**,** Kate**,** awesomesausome**,** jen**,** postcardmemoirs**,** fanfic reader**. I'll be talking to those of you with accounts later today, once my sorry ass is out of bed again. (Also if you're ever too lazy to log in for a review, or want to leave me your tumblr, feel free to give me methods of contacting you. I love to talk to reviewers and reply to comments.)

* * *

**CHAPTER SIX**

* * *

There's one person that she really wants to know is all right—well, okay, more than one, several actually, but two of them are sitting near her right now and Sloan thinks that Will is frantically panicking (is that something you can say? Or is it just frantic, or just panicking? Can you be both? She thinks Will might be both) about MacKenzie enough for the two of them, and this might make her a bitch, so really the only person she _needs _to know is okay is Don, and he's not answering her texts.

The thing is that she keeps trying to remember if Don had had his phone in his hands, or with him at all when the gunman started shooting. It could have been in his pocket, she thinks, but there's also a distinct possibility that he left it in his office when he went to go talk to Mac. But he was _with Mac_ which means he's probably _still with_ Mac. If they're both still alive.

(If not, Sloan thinks grimly, they're probably still together anyway.)

She hasn't mentioned this to Will. Will is preoccupied spilling his heart out to MacKenzie via email, which Sloan has decided might be a good thing for him to do, because one: it's constructive, and two: he can't take it back like the voicemail, and Sloan knows for how goddamn long everyone had to hear about that, especially her, over drinks.

And seriously, she made the Goldilocks pitch _how _long ago? Honestly, she's a little pissed it took a workplace shooting to get Will off his ass (or on his ass, really, Sloan thinks, all things considering) to realize that he needs to get a move on with their dear Mackie.

But all things considered, Sloan recognizes that contacting Don will also solve the "panicking about MacKenzie" problem, especially if Mac doesn't have her cell phone.

(It will instead create a "panicking about MacKenzie reading the emails—of which Sloan thinks Will has moved onto a second in what could potentially be a very eloquent and pathos-driven anthology of six years of emotional repression bubbling out in… well, thirty minutes and counting—problem." She makes a mental note to prevent Will from reaching Mac's computer and various electronic devices before Mac can.

Sloan realizes very quickly that irreverent humor has become her coping mechanism in this situation, which she surmises is because she's terrified and helpless, not humiliated and helpless. And prays that this doesn't end tragically, because there will be no coming back for Will from this, if he told MacKenzie everything that he needed to thirty minutes too late. )

She's just gotten off the phone with her father, having promised to call him regularly with updates, and is now trying to piece together Charlie's conversation with the Chief of Police from his occasional questions. His face is hard to gauge—Charlie's not an open book like Mac, or even Will, when he's not on the air, but he can be, especially around ACN's more senior staff—and Sloan doesn't know what _that_ means, if anything at all. But it's Will, Elliot, and herself. Surely he wouldn't have to lie to them? Protect them? Although, Sloan figures, Charlie views all of them as his children, and this is the kind of extreme circumstance that would probably bring about Charlie's more ingrained paternal instincts, but… even still…

Maybe it's just Charlie's Resting Stoic Face. Sloan's never been in a foxhole with him before, so she thinks it's entirely possible. She'd never expected that he would grab her by the collar and push her down before dragging her to the bathroom at the sound of gunfire like it was rote, but that happened. And then go back and drag Will's ass in too, but Sloan thinks _that _was less about military training more about eight years worth of knowlege of Will and MacKenzie's old routine.

(Will hurts MacKenzie, Will still eventually feels shitty about it, but still kind of justified. Anyone else hurts MacKenzie, and Will goes tribal.)

"They think there's more than one shooter," Charlie says once he gets off the phone.

Will looks up from his phone. "Why?"

"There appears to have been two people on the ground in the lobby, waiting to be tipped off," he answers. "One of the receptionists had just been about to call security on _them, _before people started rushing out of the building. Another person from first floor staff said that she saw them going up as everyone was trying to get down."

"Why were they about to have security called on them?" she asks, and thinks _and why didn't they? _but that's a moot point.

"They had been waiting for almost an hour, with 'suspicious looking' bags, because vague descriptions have always served everyone well—but you know what, it doesn't matter. There are three of them, as far as we know, and calls just came in a few minutes ago that they were on the twenty-fourth floor," Charlie looks to Elliot as he says this, and Sloan's eyes follow, and Will's as well, and she feels her face crumple a bit when Elliot covers his face with hands. "There are reports of—"

"No," Elliot says, shaking his head, carding his hands through his hair.

"Deaths, other injuries. I don't have names for you, not yet. I'm so sorry."

Elliot doesn't say anything. So she does.

"We still don't know who these people are?"

"They've haven't made any demands—"

"So they're just shooting at us," she says, because that's more terrifying. This has to be about Genoa, Sloan thinks. Yes, the argument contains a fair share of _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_, but _everyone _has been taking pot-shots at them, figuratively and now literally, at them over it. And a whole lot of people are rather rightfully pissed off at them about it—veteran's associations, military widows, the entire Department of Defense…

"Yet."

"Yet?" Will looks up from his BlackBerry again.

"They're looking for a hostage?" Elliot asks, making the connection quicker than Sloan. Sloan thinks it's because she didn't want to make that connection. They were the ones who did the broadcast. Her and Will. And then Elliot. They're the faces of the story. And then MacKenzie, who's really just a name in the credits to most of the audience, or Charlie, who has had his name in the byline a few times over this.

But still,Sloan thinks most of the more valuable hostages are sitting with her in this bathroom right now. So, who else—

"One of them was overhead asking where the President of AWM's office was."

Oh.

* * *

"We've got the first aid kit, some water bottles, since you said something about irrigation so I thought, we thought, yes, sorry, that purified water would be better than tap, and the defibrillator." Maggie doesn't know how comforting it'll be to Mac to know that they have what's need to restart her heart if it comes to that, but she thinks that Mac is, in her soul, a pragmatist, and it's better than not having it, because Maggie remembers all too keenly—visually, tactilely; the sound, the smell—Daniel dead in her arms, and just, what if they'd had it then? "And Sloan's texted Don a few times but we don't know how you want us to answer that."

"She's with Will. And Charlie and Elliot," Don adds, as they drop the supplies onto the floor. "In Will's bathroom."

Only Neal and Gary know. That it's Mac, that is. Everyone else is under the assumption that the person with the bullet lodged in their abdomen is a member of support staff who Maggie well and truly hopes isn't dead because then… it'll seem even worse, the deception, that they wouldn't care for a second assistant as much as they would for Mac, but they don't and that's honest.

Mac is their center.

Also sooner or later wires might get crossed and Will would find out and also it's just bad for morale.

"We know," Jim says, rooting through the first aid kit.

"How?" she asks.

"Will emailed," he answers. Maggie notices for the first time that his shirt is on top of Mac's right side, soaked through with blood, and she feels an unsettling pang of guilt radiate out from her stomach. They weren't quick enough.

"He emailed?" Don looks up briefly from where he's trying to delicately settle the defibrillator, like it's going to shock him just on principle despite the fact that it's not on.

"I'm lead to believe there was a hope that Mac's problem was that she didn't have her BlackBerry and perhaps, as the Exectutive Producer, have commandeered a lesser staffer's phone," Jim says, not presenting Will's desperate rationale for what it's worth because it's the reality they're dealing with.

"It would be a nice problem to have," Mac mutters.

Maggie agrees. And then thinks, and suggests, "We could have Don text Sloan back, tell her we're all fine, and then Will would stop worrying."

"Will would call," Mac replies, frowning. At what, Maggie isn't certain, but possibly how quickly and assuredly Mac let herself say that.

"Are you sure?" Don asks, hopeful to be contradicted. Mac's subconscious optimism towards her relationship with Will is a fragile thing, Maggie understands, and doesn't really think Don should be exploiting that at the moment. (Although, under different circumstances, she thinks she might have rolled her eyes at Don for asking the question. Of course Will would call. Has Don not been here the past three years?)

"You didn't read the email," Jim says.

Fair… enough, Maggie supposes. Will could definitely be emotionally extemporaneous under duress. "Okay… we could tell Sloan that Don's phone is almost out of battery. That you," she's looking at Don, "were about to head back to your office to charge it. That way if we don't respond again they assume the battery died."

"Assuming no more bullets are fired," Don counters a little expasperated, but in a way that Maggie knows is covering up how nervous he is, and they both watch Jim rip open package after package of sterile gauze. "Shouldn't we elevate Mac's legs, or something?"

"Not for chest wounds. It causes blood to pool in the trunk," Jim answers, not hastily, nor urgently, but quickly enough that Maggie can tell this is protocol to him. "Mac? What do you think? Should we text Sloan?" He opens one of the water bottles and sets it down next to him.

Maggie looks at Mac, really looks at her, since the first time she's come back in the room.

_Fuck_.

Just… fuck. With Daniel, it had been over quickly. Whatever it had been, it had been over quickly. This is slow, drawn-out, and with Mac's chest heaving, fingers clenching and unclenching, face pale and sweaty and tear-streaked—excruciating. A lesser person would be screaming, but maybe six years of an emotional knife to the gut has prepared Mac for this. Maybe that was why Mac didn't crumble after the stabbing, after the Middle East. Maybe it's why she did.

"Sure," Mac answers. "But after, please," like she wants it all to be over as quickly as possible, before she loses whatever nerve and confidence she's built up to lay there and take it—and Maggie notices that Don's kneeling again at Mac's shoulders, bracing her, and so Maggie quickly takes a place at Mac's left side, opposite Jim. After half a heartbeat's hesitation, she grabs Mac's hand.

Jim puts his hand over the shirt over Mac's ribs.

He looks down at her, softly, and Maggie remembers sitting on the balcony with her back straight up against the side of the building, her palms pressed against cold concrete, trying to anchor herself in her panic, and then Jim, coming and doing it for her. "This is gonna hurt—"

"Like a son of a bitch," Mac wheezes. "I… remember."

"Really?" There's a little quirk at one of the corners of his mouth that might be a smile.

"No…" Mac gives a small little laugh, more of a breathy rasp than much of anything else, and Maggie decides there's nothing more than she wants in this moment, besides Mac's survival, but for Jim to be her friend again. "They'd given me morphine… by this point… last time."

"Do you want something to bite on?"

Fear flashes and freezes in her eyes for a moment before melting slowly. She nods.

The next few minutes are slow, the seconds ticking by like held breaths.

Jim puts on latex gloves. Jim removes the shirt. Jim checks the gunshot wound for clotting, and does not find any. Jim uses one water bottle to remove debris from the wound, and Mac screams against the damp towel Jim put in her mouth, squeezing Maggie's hand painfully. (It's a welcome reprieve, somehow. Grounding. Mac has a strong grip.) Don holds Mac's shoulders down. Maggie puts her hand down on Mac's hip, keeping her steady even as her legs twitch.

And then that part it is over, and Jim is putting dressings over the wound and Mac's belly is less covered in blood, more covered in water. Jim wraps her torso in a pressure bandage to quell the bleeding. Mac's face turns red and she rips the towel out of her mouth and throws up into a bag held by Don. Maggie stands, squeezes Mac's hand, and wets another towel with cold water, wiping her mouth and face while Mac struggles to breathe.

And then it is _all_ over, and Maggie pushes herself away from it, feeling her brain shut down in tiny increments. She's still kneeling next to Mac, but she thinks her hands aren't quite hers while she's using the towel to wipe away the blood that's congealed between Mac's fingers, and then Maggie gone completely, once Jim pulls Mac into his arms and arranges her between his splayed legs, her back against his chest.

Maggie lowers herself onto her backside, scuttling back until she hits a wall, wrapping her arms around her knees, barely seeing Don, shaken and pale, typing a text to Sloan into his phone, barely seeing Jim picking up Mac's BlackBerry and hearing, almost through a fog, him quietly tell her:

"Will sent you another email. Do you want me to read it to you?"

And Mac, her eyes shut and breathing unsteadily through pursed lips, unevenly nodding her head.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	7. Chapter Seven

**A/N: **I preface this chapter with an apology: I never actually knew I was capable of being this terrible. I know all rocks thrown at me for this are entirely deserved. In fact, I encourage it. I welcome it. (Those of you who have been with me from the BSG fandom will be less surprised, I'm sure.)

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter, and everyone who has favorited/followed! This one who goes out to Dee, who marathoned the entire show in like three days based on just pure content density from me reblogging shit onto her dash.

Also now is probably the point to remind you guys that not everyone is a reliable narrator.

* * *

She had been about to reply to him.

"Had been" in the sense that MacKenzie had barely begun to wrap her brain around the implications—which hadn't all been implications; some being rather flat-out, wholly unquantified, statements—of his words. Such as: he was sorry—did that mean that she was forgiven? And what did he mean by "we?"Their mistakes? Not just hers. Theirs. But it had been perfect. He had been perfect. And she had wrecked it.

And she—

Is bleeding out again. Just not on foreign soil this time. Even though his email has definitely put her on foreign footing.

And it has also given her hope.

And so she had laid on the floor, trying to piece together a response.

_Dear Will, I'm sorry too. _And then what? He knew she was sorry. He'd have to be a complete idiot if he didn't know that. He did know that. How many times had she—

_I'm so glad you're all right. _She is. She's incredibly glad he's all right. _And... _

Words have always come easier to him than her. Which, Mac supposes, is why he's the one who was a speechwriter for Bush 41 and the RNC and is now the face of ACN. They may arguably have three hundred IQ points between the two of them, but the ratio on that one definitely tips in his favor, no matter how times he tells her he only skipped the first and third grades because his tiny rural elementary school had no idea what to do with someone who functioned even the tiny bit above grade level.

She's never been able to make the words come out right. She can report the facts, yes, present an argument in its best form, but ask her about her emotions and it's like putting her thoughts in the eye of a tornado and stepping back to watch the winds overtake them and rip them apart and leave them strewn across her brain. And her, scrambling to piece them back together again. Hell, she thinks, she doesn't even fucking _deserve _emotions. Why should she be allowed ownership of pain over something she caused? It doesn't make any sense.

_I love you. I have always loved you. Not always, I suppose, otherwise we wouldn't be in this position. Did you know that psychologists have found that, on average, it takes a person four months to fall in love? _Four months. It had taken her four months to be sold on wanting to spend the rest of her life with Will McAvoy, and Mac isn't entirely certain how, when in comparison to Brian Brenner, it took her _that long._ It's laughable, really, how moronic she had been. _It took me four months to fall in love with you. I'm average. And we both know you've always been above average. Stellar, really. I'm only just on the bell curve. No wonder you were the kid in class that everyone hated. _

Her words don't measure up.

_I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I'll never leave again. Please. I'm sorry. _

Or at least, they don't now. She can hardly think.

She could hardly keep her fingers on the buttons of her BlackBerry, her fingers slippery with blood, the screen fogging in and out of her line of sight. _Dear Will_, she had typed. Because he is dear. Her dear, her darling Will. Billy. The boy most sinned against. _I'm safe. _And it hadn't even been an outright lie. She _was_ safe. Her location is, even still, rather secure. The door on her bathroom, unlike the one to her office, is no joke.

She had been trying to figure out where to go from there when the first roiling coughs had started, rather small but still burning. She had been about to reply to him. And then her hands had fallen limply over her chest, her BlackBerry loosening from her grip and clattering to the floor while she had heaved for air. Jim had come up to her from behind, carefully lifting her against him, slowly inclining her until she could breathe again.

_Please_, she had thought, fully expecting to be reduced to begging before this was out, and Jim had tipped one of the little cups of water Maggie had filled into her mouth, slowly, carefully, circumspect. Jim. Her Jim.

_Swallow,_ he had murmured. _Mac, please swallow. _Please, yes.

And then he'd laid her back down onto her makeshift pillow and she had been shivering, her body running hot and cold and her lips wet and she'd licked them, to make sure the taste wasn't metallic, because it was harder to breathe but she also knows she's in shock but she also knew that the bullet was close to her right lung. And then she'd been drifting, and felt Jim pile something soft onto her abdomen, and press down over her right side, and then nothing at all for a few moments until he'd brought her back.

She thinks she's drifting now.

In his arms, though. Jim is warm. Not as warm as Will, who always gave off heat like a bloody furnace. She always wound up kicking off her yoga pants in the middle of the night to compensate, and would wake up with one his hands stroking the bare skin of her leg from hip to knee. He probably still is like a fucking furnace, Mac thinks, wondering why she rendered that in past tense... and just... why.

She's too tired to beg. And not exhausted enough to start again. But she doesn't doubt that she'll get there.

"MacKenzie," Jim says, the start of the email. Will's switched from _Mac _to _MacKenzie_. But there's no _dear _or other form of greeting. But still, full name. She thinks he might mean business. Jim clears his throat awkwardly, and then begins. "I'm sorry about hurting you when I was only mad at myself. Mad at myself for letting myself think, or even subconsciously, perhaps, go through with forgiving you. Mad at myself for letting you back in. Mad at myself for not retaining some stupid moral high ground over you, mad at myself for being vulnerable around you again. I punished you for my own misgivings, when you have only proved time and time again that I can trust you. You've earned that back, and more, and I didn't want to even recognize that. I've been selfish, and at times, cruel to you, and fucking unfair. You're allowed to have expectations of me. Anything otherwise is..."

_Oh_, she thinks, more than a little stunned. _Billy._

She encloses her hand over Jim's wrist where it lays protectively over her stomach, and squeezes gently when he stops reading.

"Keep going," she murmurs, turning her face into his bicep, her eyes fluttering closed.

"Don't fall asleep," he whispers, calm but urgent.

"Trying not to," she says a moment too late, after he's already gently jostled her in an attempt to keep her alert. "Keep reading."

"Okay." He takes a moment, Mac guesses to find his place. "I keep thinking about our loose ends. I've held out on forgiving you, but at what cost? I suppose that's the question I never asked myself. What does the moral high ground cost? What does refusing to be vulnerable cost? You'd think that a four hundred dollar an hour shrink might think of those questions for me, but that's water under the fucking bridge. And it's rather clear to me, _now,_ that I'm a fucking moron, because I'd rather have you, MacKenzie, how we are now or whatever we become than whatever small satisfaction that being in pain over what you did six years ago gives me. You're my dearest friend and partner. And I'm an idiot. And... you were right. It's not forever."

She doesn't realize for a few seconds that Jim has stopped reading; only realizes when he shifts under her and turns her so she's tucked into his shoulder, both of their backs against the wall, angled into one of the corners of the room. Weakly, she tries to help, pressing her palms down onto the floor to shift her weight with him, and then tries not to freak out when all it does is send pain shivering up her spine, aftershocks jolting her shoulders forward in ungraceful, jerky motions. Crying out, she slumps back against him, and Jim takes a moment to soothe her, whispering _sorry, sorry, sorry _over and over again while he readjusts her until she's what she guesses is Jim's approximation of comfortable for her.

She's doesn't bother to tell him that it's beyond helping at this point.

"It's not forever," she reminds him, voice hoarse, when he fumbles for where he left off.

"It's not forever," he repeats back, taking a few more seconds more before, "It's not forever because you came back. You tried to tie the loose ends together. You tried, MacKenzie, and it shouldn't have just been you working on that and I'm not entirely certain that I was and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Mac, and you deserved better than that. Because you're the woman that I loved."

_Loved._

And Jim knows.

And he stops reading.

"Keep going," she encourages him, clutching his shirt harder than she had thought possible, opening her eyes. "It's all right."

"Mac, he… that was..." Jim lets the BlackBerry fall to rest on his thigh, lets the screen go dark. Mac blinks at it, confused. _Loved. Oh. He loved her. He had loved her. And then she'd—_

"That was it," she finishes for him, the resolution to not be something that happened to Jim Harper gaining traction again in her tired mind, the thought coming together after she had allowed it to be scattered by the wind for her own desires.

She'll protect him. She can do that.

"He signed his name."

_Loved._

"I'm sure he did."

She lets herself drift.

* * *

"Oh my God." Sloan claps her hand over her mouth, eyes fixed on her cell phone before lifting her chin in disjointed moments—as if she's loathe to look away from whatever's displayed on the screen—and addressing the rest of them. "They're okay! They're all okay. Don, Jim, Maggie, and Mac. They're okay."

Will swallows hard, trying to wipe the rising storm of emotion from his face. "Who's it from?"

"Don; he just texted me back." She turns the screen towards him, looking incadescently happy and accidentally puts it too close to his face, so he has to grip it with his own hand to put it in his line of vision. "Look."

He heas to read it a few times, his mind racing through the words again and again. _Thank God. _

"Locked in Mac's bathroom. With Mac, Jim, Maggie. All safe. Glad to hear you guys are too," Will reads, loud enough for Charlie and Elliot to hear as well. "Mine is the only phone we have. Running out of battery."

"See," Sloan says, with a huge smile pasted on her face. "Mac just dropped her phone or something. She's fine. They're fine."

And just, _Thank God_, he thinks, his limbs overwhelmed with a dreamy kind of numbness, his body tingling with a sudden palpable relief so strong that he loses sight of his train of thought and stares dumbly down at the BlackBerry in his hand, a half-written email spashed across the screen. Mac's safe. She's safe, and he's not too late, and he can work through this, they can work through this. She's safe, and he can explain the emails and they can work through this. Hell, he can read her own emails, from when she was embedded, all three years worth of them. Hell, he probably _should_. Unless she doesn't want him to, of course.

He can tell her that he loves her, has never stopped loving her.

And by God, he loves her. His hands won't stop shaking and he can't stop thinking about how much he loves her, and how he's going to tell her that, just as soon as he gets out of this stupid building and he can hold her in his arms.

A moment later, he realizes he's smiling, quite possibly for the first time in years.

He loves MacKenzie McHale, and he forgives her, and it's going to be all right.

* * *

"Sloan just asked if anyone's injured." Don looks to his right, where Maggie has completely shut down in on herself, and to his left, where Mac's breathing has become startlingly labored. And then he looks down at his phone, which reads out two-fifteen in the afternoon, and thinks, _fuck. _"What should I say?"

_We're safe_ hadn't been an actual lie. Don knows Will and Charlie and Elliot and Sloan will totally kick his ass for it, but it hadn't been an out-and-out lie, which he thinks is important on some level.

He wants to say, _No, Mac's been shot and is barely hanging in there after Will's last email, so tell him to haul his tall, blond, and Midwestern ass over here to fix this_, because he heard Jim reading the email and no matter how quiet Jim had tried to be, this room is less than six by four feet square so there was really no escaping the latest installment in the Saga of Will and MacKenzie, and honestly, Don thinks, he's had enough sad drunken conversations with Mac in the middle of the night about their lonely hearts to make that kind of demand for her. So he wants to say that.

But his loyalty to Mac outweighs his anger at Will at the moment, so he looks to her.

"What do you want to say, Mac?" he asks, and she stirs against Jim. He resolves to call dispatch again after this. It's been forty-five goddamn minutes, they have to be getting close to getting them out of here.

_The woman I loved._

That's cold, Don thinks. Even for Will. But he guesses he can't fault the man for being honest. But he can fault him for being incredibly fucking stupid, so Don is.

(He wonders if fucking Mrs. MacBeth falls under punishing Mac. Or if it falls under not wanting to be vulnerable. Misdirection, or whatever. All though, how dating a gossip columnist prevents you from being vulnerable, especially when you dump her in the ACN Morning green room, Don thinks he will never know. Will may pride himself on being rational, but he never is where Mac is involved. Don has no doubt he'd rush to Mac's side if there was a bullet to light a fire under his ass, but he'd remain too emotionally repressed to call her again after the initial panic had subsided.)

"Tell him… we're all fine," Mac answers, lifting her head to look at him.

_Fuck, Mac_, he thinks, remembering the vibrant, excitable CNN senior producer who had given him his first summer internship almost fifteen years ago. That summer he'd been half in love with her, following her around, fostering his self-indulgent crush on the pretty lady who'd first believed in him. Every male intern had been in love with her. They'd all been willing to walk through fire for her that summer, as New York boiled and the Clinton scandal rumbled on and Mac waxed ethical about it all.

Don thinks he still might walk through fire for her.

(Mac's asked him to do a lot of things for her, from that first summer onward. But never lie for her.)

Time to find out.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	8. Chapter Eight

**A/N:** Hello everyone! I promise this chapter is a bit of an ease off the gas angst-wise, so don't worry, breathe easy. (Or easier.) Shout out to my new beta, **lilacmermaid25** who has offered me her awesome editing skills. Also many thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter, or just followed or favorited the story!

I swear to God, one day I will be on top of my shit enough (that day is probably ten days from now, when all my papers will be handed in and I'll be on the eight-hour Amtrak train ride home for Thanksgiving) to respond to reviews _before _I update, but I generally assume that posting the new chapter is more appreciated than my replies to your gracious comments. But anyway, thanks to: **TheGingerGuineaPig**, **JM**, **Tripple-A-Plus**, **MoonlightGardenias**, **myragumm**, **Eternally Romantic**, **postcardmemoirs**, **bookofgwen**, **awesomesausome**, **Don't Anticipate**, and **Clemence**, who is currently in the running for my favorite anonymous reviewer.

* * *

**CHAPTER EIGHT**

* * *

Maggie listens to Don's voice rise, five minutes into his conversation with the operator on the ground outside the AWM building. "Yes, I know we're on lockdown, yes, I know this building has forty-four floors and while I'm _incredibly _thankful that the FBI decided to land a helicopter on the roof so SWAT could sweep the building from two directions, that doesn't help the fact that we're on a goddamn middle floor, Jessica!"

(Don is apparently on a first name basis with the dispatch officer. Maggie is not particularly surprised.)

"Right, so the sixteenth and the thirty-fifth. That's great. Great news."

She can imagine that Jessica is less than pleased by his overly facetious tone, but Maggie's also less than pleased (not angry, like Don, but terrified, all though he's probably just shrouding his fear with sheer volume at this point) with how fucking long they've been on lockdown. And the implication that the shooter is somewhere between the sixteenth and thirty-fifth floors and no one can find him.

"Wait, _more than one?_" There's a pause, during which Maggie feels herself leaning towards him, straining to hear the other side of the telephone call."No, I don't care if you weren't supposed to tell me that, you pluralized it and I want an explanation… of course I know what I heard, I'm a TV producer. This semantic shit is my job."

_More than one. _

So, more than just some lunatic with a gun.

"No, Jessica, I'm not buying that this is just some guy who lives in his mother's basement with seven cats, an internet connection and apparently a fucking semiautomatic." Don seethes, rolling his eyes before getting to his feet. Maggie lifts her head from her arms and looks up at him. "Well, I'm sure someone's reporting on this, Jessica, so maybe CNN can tell me more about it than you can. Yeah, I'm sorry too."

Don ends the call and looks at his phone for a moment like it has betrayed him by virtue of not being a flip-phone so he could at least snap it shut and get some petty amount of satisfaction from hanging up on the 911 operator.

"How long?" Maggie asks, bracing her hand back against the wall and pushing herself up onto her feet.

Don keeps staring at his phone like he wants to throw it, so Maggie gently takes it from his grasp.

"Don?"

"They're saying another forty minutes if they're coming from below, but that's only if they don't locate the shooters on one of those floors, or other some other mitigating circumstance arises. More than an hour if it's from above." He blinks slowly, and Maggie thinks Don's coming to some sort of revelation that he can't control this situation.

They both turn to look at Mac, whose eyes keep fluttering but never quite open all the way, shifting restlessly in Jim's grasp.

How long can she go on?

Maggie doesn't think the bullet hit any major arteries. She thinks Jim would have said so, or be more freaked out, or _something _that she could read on his face because Maggie's always been good at reading Jim, and Mac's been bleeding for forty-five minutes now, and Jim said something about her liver, and Maggie's read studies on organ death and blood loss and hypoxia and…

She's circling the drain.

Well, not quite, but she's getting there, Maggie thinks. She's pale and not breathing well anymore, and Maggie really hopes that's from the pain, not… anything else.

They have the defibrillator. That's her small comfort.

Her brain circles her back to another salient fact. "Wait, _shooters_? As in… shooters, _plural_?"

Shooters, plural, means collaboration. Organization. _Genoa. _A quick glance back to Jim shows that this has garnered his attention as well.

Don licks his lips, shrugging his shoulders. "Somebody's got to have it by now. I checked a few minutes ago to see if the FBI or NYPD had done a press conference, or released a statement, and there's nothing yet, but a few networks have got to be working this thing. But yeah, dispatch said shooters."

"Okay, so we check the wires," she says, handing Don back his phone before looking at Jim to hand over Mac's BlackBerry. "Start from there."

He hesitates, keeping his hand closed over the device. "Can't really do that on a phone. And can you hand me the fire blanket? Her skin's getting clammy."

"I'm still awake… you know," the _she_ in question wheezed delicately.

"So we check all the news sites," Maggie retorts, feeling gears and cogs slip into place, knit together, and turn. If she keeps going, she won't panic.

"The apps will be streaming it if they break with it," Don says, nodding.

Maggie smiles at him, more relieved than anything else, nodding along, before remembering to pick up the fire blanket and shake it out. "Do you think anyone's broken in with it yet?"

"Don't know. Also, don't we have, you know, friends at other networks?" Don asks, while Maggie takes the few steps to Jim and helps him tuck it around Mac. To her credit, Mac seems to be trying to rally, even though her eyes are closed. Maggie wonders briefly if she should turn off the lights, but then realizes that would only encourage Mac to drift off again. "Who we could call?"

"No," Mac mutters quietly. "Although this will definitely… make the jokes on… _The Daily Show_… stop." She takes a moment to regain her breath, lifting her hands and closing them around the fabric. "Thanks…"

"Yeah," Maggie whispers, feeling her panic surge up again and seep between the gears and cogs in her brain. She pushes it down, forcing her eyes from Mac to Jim, and suddenly remembering, how didn't she before—

"Call Hallie."

Jim's face lights up briefly, and then falls. "I don't have her number memorized."

"_Jim_," she whines, or would be whining if this wasn't such a fucking serious situation. "She's in a room, ostensibly surrounded by people who are getting information as it comes, and getting the information herself, and also you'd think she'd like to know that you aren't dead, or something, and _you can't remember your girlfriend's number._"

"It's in my phone! I don't have to remember it!"

Mac's eyes are open again. Well, at least their arguing is keeping her awake, and she says, a moment later, "Doesn't she have a—a business line, listed somewhere?"

Jim smiles sheepishly.

Mac rolls her eyes fondly. "_Call_ her. Find out what we're dealing with." She huffs a pained breath. "And lie me down again, if you could? It's getting hard to breathe like this. And my back—is killing me. And Maggie, start checking the websites."

* * *

Sloan shifts nervously next to Will. Her phone is locked, the screen pressed into her thigh, and she's still… he can't possibly know, right? Her expression hasn't changed, she hasn't make any noticeable gasps, or made any distinct changes in breathing? And there is _no way_ that Will could have seen the text message. She thinks.

She want to reread it, to make sure it says what she thinks it says, but she won't risk Will looking over, or down, or—she's kind of tucked under his arm, but is sitting up pretty straight, so she thinks it's more over than down, even though she had definitely been slouching before. It's too risky to open it again.

_Don't tell anyone, Mac's orders. But she's been shot. Nowhere serious, but she's in a lot of pain, which is why she won't answer her phone. Will's emails are helping, though. See if you can get him to keep sending them. _

Okay.

She can do this for Mac.

She's actually freaking the fuck out right now, but she can do this for Mac. She just needs to keep biting the insides of her cheeks, and stop imagining Mac bleeding out, and in pain, and…

Actually, she has _no idea _how she can do this. She has some mileage on Will, intellectually, but there's no way she can manipulate him into sending Mac more emails… especially considering she hadn't _known_ that he was sending Mac emails.

Really, that's so incredibly sweet. Or something.

(If she doesn't stop freaking out one of them is going to notice and ask her what's wrong and they're going to connect it to Don's text and she's not going to be able to lie well enough and _holy shit_ Mac has been shot.)

Still, really, it's been six fucking months since he dumped Nina and because he couldn't get his shit together between then and now _she _has to be the arbiter of… she doesn't actually think there's an end to that sentence. A graceful one, anyway. But still, Sloan thinks this would not be going the way it is if Will had just taken her advice and made a move on Mac _before _Genoa. Really, the two had been getting so close even before the retraction.

_How? _she texts frantically back to Don. _Just say 'oh Mac's totally fine, but keep sending her these emails you didn't tell me about?' I can't do that! _

Maybe she could lie.

Sloan wonders if she could discern some line, between "injuries Will wouldn't be bothered by" and "injuries Will would be bothered by but not enough to try to get to Mac" and "I hope Elliot and Charlie took their vitamins today, because Will used to play tight-end for the Cornhuskers." Don would know. Don has to know, because he's the one with all the human knowledge in their relationship… friendship.

Sloan's really, really happy to hear (well, read) that he's not hurt. Even if they're… just friends… just, even if they're just friends.

_Because you never asked me out_, she thinks, trying really hard not to dredge up the memory.

God, over a year later and it's still ringing in her ears. Embarrassing. You know, casually tell a guy who's about to ask his girlfriend to move in with him that you've been holding out for him to ask you on a date.

_Well, when you put it that way. _Oh, so he doesn't… have any ideas either.

_Yeah, when I put it the way it is! _Then she thinks about it for a moment, and is walloped by another wave of embarrassment. Or shame. Is there a difference there? Maybe just a pang of her social ineptness. _I'm sorry, I know you're probably dealing with a lot right now, and are just trying to take care of Mac. _

She licks her lips, looking furtively at Will.

_If the opportunity comes, I'll take it. No promises it will be done well, but the attempt will be made, since I am clearly your third and only choice. _

Because honestly, Charlie would be pick number one. And Elliot number two, and she's third because she is the least tactful person in the room so Don really must have a good reason for not letting the other two in. Or maybe… she _could _be second, she thinks she edges Elliot out on closeness with Will, but they did co-anchor for over a year…

She sighs, letting her head drop back against the wall, listening to Charlie and Will talking about lockdown procedures and how long it should be taking SWAT to clear each floor, if they'll connect the shooter to Genoa. He seems so damn happy. Happier than someone who's just been shot at has right to be. (Or maybe it's just relief. She's not the best judge at other people's emotions.) And at some point, soon, someone's going to tell him, _hey, Mac's in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Why? Because someone put a bullet in her… _Don hasn't actually told her where, Sloan realizes, and chalks it up to him probably being busy with Jim, making her comfortable. And poor Maggie, too. Sloan realizes _she's _probably not coping well either.

What about Gary?

She looks at Elliot, who's looking appropriately stressed out about all of this.

Her phone lights up.

_Third? _

She smiles tightly. _Don't smile, _she tells herself.

_Elliot, Charlie, me. You could have texted any of them. _

He takes only a moment to respond. _You texted me. Not that I'm complaining, or anything. _

Oh. She did. Right.

She looks at Elliot again.

_Or maybe you're my first choice. _

Wait, what does that mean. She's definitely not even the closest person to Will in this room. Well, proximity-wise, yes, because even though Will is less obviously panicked his hand is still occasionally brushing through her hair, and it's really is quite comforting, Charlie is the one who's known him the longest and is Will's… father figure, but Sloan figures Charlie is Mac's too, so maybe that's what Don was thinking? That Charlie would freak out? But she cares about Mac too, and…

"What did Don say?" Charlie asks, and it takes Sloan a moment to realize that he has spoken.

She does her best facsimile of a smile. "They're all okay. He said they're okay." Her phone vibrates again, and she looks down to see another text from Don. _Tell him we just realized Mac's cell phone is right outside her office door and my phone is dying so we're going to try to get hers in a few minutes. _

Oh.

_Oh, _that is _really_ smart.

"What?" Charlie asks, eyebrows raised. Sloan furrows her brow. There's something inscrutable about Charlie's face that's throwing her off.

She clears her throat. "Don said his battery's about to give out, since, um, everyone's been using his cell phone to call their families. Mac's is right outside her office door, so they're going to go out and get it when his phone dies."

Will's hand twitches around his BlackBerry, and she smiles internally.

"Is that smart?" Elliot asks, startled.

Sloan shrugs, looking down at her phone, _Done. _

"We can't stop them."

She bites her lip when Will types out the lock code on his phone, fingers starting to move over the keys again.

* * *

_Dear MacKenzie, _

_I used to be so bitter about what we could have been, the love that we had. I'd look back and imagine we'd be six years married by now, with an Upper East Side brownstone and a couple of kids with pretentious names, and then I realized… that's not what I want anymore. Those aren't the people we are anymore. I let that go without even realizing it, because I like the people we are now. I wouldn't trade who we are now for what we could have had. I'm not that man any more than you are that woman, and I love the woman that you are now…_

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	9. Chapter Nine

**A/N:** Thank you all for waiting patiently! If you've been following me on tumblr, you know I've been ill the past few days. So um... apologies for the fact that I wrote this chapter while high on Naproxen, but major thanks to my lovely beta **lilacmermaid25** for cleaning it up for me! All mistakes left are mine. Earlier today I also published a post-Election Night oneshot called _Anxious Heart, _which you can find on my profile.

Thanks to everyone who has reviewed or followed or favorited since the last chapter! Shout-outs to: **DanaWhitaker**, **Eternally Romantic**, **Groovymumma**, **Ellie 5192**, **awesomesausome**,** MoonlightGardenias**, **Tripple-A-Plus**, **TheGingerGuineaPig**, **OMG**, **fanficfanuk**, **weB3now**, and **Clemence**! Reminder that if you don't have an account and want a response, you can always leave me your email or contact me on tumblr.

* * *

**CHAPTER NINE**

* * *

"I've got people calling me wanting confirmation that the gunshot victim on the twenty-third floor is MacKenzie McHale."

"Who is?"

"CNN, MSNBC, and Fox."

Charlie sighs. He's been dreading this. God, the poor girl, and he's (he keeps hearing her in her English accent telling him _just Mac is fine_, after greeting him with a handshake and smile her first day at ACN after he'd poached her from CNN to produce _News Night_) certain she had to be afraid, it's been nearly a goddamn hour, and if she's still awake. He keeps praying.

"What did you tell them?"

"That we don't know who the gunshot victim is," Leona answers indignantly, even though he hadn't meant anything by it.

"But you can confirm that—" He glances over to Sloan and Will, huddled together, and he knows that Sloan knows too, probably from Don, and it seems like everyone knows that Will can't know.

"Yeah, it's her. I listened to the dispatch tape myself. It's Keefer who made the calls, and you can hear McHale's pet in the background giving him the info."

Leona's been on the ground at the police barricade for the better part of an hour now, feeding him updates and, it would seem, running all of ACN by herself. _It's my goddamn company_, she had said, _of course I'm staying down here. _She's nervous, probably as afraid as he is and Leona's filter is negligible when she gets like this, but goddamn.

He wants to correct Leona, tell her that _McHale's pet _is Jim Harper, _News Night _senior producer, who has walked through a hail of bullets for MacKenzie_ twice_ now. Hell, the boy was the one to call him when she got stabbed back in '09. But he can't correct her, because even though Will is back to staring half-bewildered and half-determined at his BlackBerry again, the guy has a nose like a bloodhound for all things Mac.

"You got anything else for me?" he asks instead.

Leona heaves a sigh. "They still can't find my damn son."

"He wasn't in his office?" They'd started clearing the building from the top down thirty minutes ago; Reese would have been a high-profile target, so SWAT would have gotten him out of the building quickly.

"No," she answers, incredulous and terrified and he gets it now, okay.

"Then where the hell was he?" His head starts spinning possibilities, but the shooters haven't made any demands as of yet.

He can tell that Leona's head racing through worst case scenario after worst case scenario too, if it was his kid he'd be racing through them, too. (He is. It _is_ his own kid. It's MacKenzie, for Chrissake.)

"I thought he'd be with you! Yelling at you, or something. I don't know."

"He wasn't." Charlie can't decide if that's for better or for worse.

"Well, they can't find him."

"He's probably hiding, like every other sane person in the building." Reese Lansing has business on every floor of the AWM building, who the fuck knows where he was when the gun starting going off. Well, his secretary, but… the poor woman was dead, and SWAT wasn't about to comb through her schedule. "Do you have an update on…" he can't say Mac, but he knows Leona will fill in the blanks, "for me?"

"Keefer is threatening the poor girl handling calls."

"That sounds like him," Charlie says, almost laughing. It does sound like Don. He casts a glance at Sloan, who is as absorbed with her phone as Will is with his. It also sounds like Don to let Sloan in on it, and Sloan's silence only confirms to Charlie that Mac is pulling the strings on keeping Will in the dark.

The kid better keep writing whatever the fuck he's writing to Mac.

"What the fuck kind of news department are you running, Charlie?" she retorts, but her heart clearly isn't in the barb. If nothing else, her voice softens with it. "I've got people making sure no details, about her or anybody else, are coming down the police scanner. But from what I've heard, it's not good. She's lost a lot of blood and is barely awake."

They've seen some things, him and Leona, over in Vietnam. He, both when he was over there as a marine and when he was over there working for her father as a reporter. They both know how long it takes someone to bleed out, what it means for it to take seconds, or a few minutes, and the toll it took on someone's buddies to watch their friend's life slip away over the course of a few hours, praying for the medevac that could be minutes or days away. The anger, the helplessness.

And his people are pretty fucking capable, especially Mac's _pet._

"Well, good to hear." Both Elliot and Sloan look up at that, and he's hoping Leona can give him something to fill the stop-gap.

"Tell them the FBI has said that no one's formally taken the claim for this yet, but they've pulled a suspect out of that coffee shop my employees like to get their lattes from, and he's affiliated with a militant subgroup or whatever of the—if you'll fucking believe this—the American Family Association. Apparently they really fucking hate Will, and us."

He sighs. Of-fucking-course. Just… of course. "Are they linking it to Genoa?"

"Of course they're linking it to Genoa." He hears her ruffling through papers, a dry, irreverent laugh forming in the back of her mouth. "I've got a report here that the New York FBI Director's given me, about the _American Family Association _condemning us for… 'libelous and treasonous actions against the US military and family values' that were 'yet another logical step in ACN's and Will McAvoy's pro-gay, pro-abortion, anti-Christian and anti-morals agenda.' Calling for his resignation, yadda yadda."

"Calling for a resignation isn't the same as shooting up a building," he offers. Not that psychos from any level of an organization can't decide to organize for themselves.

"Oh really?"

Charlie sighs. "Call me when you get news on Reese."

"Or if I get news on McHale."

It took Mac two weeks, last time, to allow him to tell Will she'd been stabbed, and only because it was slowly trickling back over the Atlantic to the rest of their colleagues' attention anyway. Charlie pretty firmly fucking believes that Mac would keep this from him. He really hopes his guess is right, that she has her cellphone and didn't pick up because she couldn't let Will know. He hopes she has her cellphone, because she needs whatever comfort she can get right now, and he just… hopes. And god, Sloan, who's as close to Mac as anyone else. They've built this family, here. _Mac _built this family here.

Although, telling Sloan… that's more Don's game.

Which means Mac is…

_Keep writing those damn emails_, he thinks, looking at Will. A look of frustration is plastered on the kid's face, and Charlie hopes it's at himself. It better be, after six fucking years.

He also hopes Don has a game plan for what to do when Mac doesn't answer Will's emails.

He really hopes that they're not stuck in here long enough that he has to use that plan, but Charlie doesn't think anything could keep Will from getting Mac if she's been shot. Hell, that's probably what got them into this problem in the first place.

* * *

This isn't right. This is… this is MacKenzie, and he has to get this perfect, and it's not… perfect. And Jesus Christ, he was a speechwriter for how many goddamn years? And he writes five scripts a week, and none of those things are about his feelings for MacKenzie, which may be the difference.

_Loved. _He thinks he's a fucking moron. _The woman I loved. _Actually, he's a huge fucking coward, and it'd be easier to keep the status quo and retain the high ground (on what, he doesn't know but apparently he wants to keep it and can't stand being fucking vulnerable to Mac) which is so fucking dumb in the face of this, and he understands that, rationally, he just needs to make himself fucking _do it._ It's not going to be easy. Nothing worth having is easy.

_It's not forever, because you came back. You tried to tie the loose ends together. You tried, MacKenzie, and it shouldn't have just been you working on that, and I'm not entirely certain that I was and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Mac, and you deserved better than that. Because you're the woman that I loved._

He thinks the first part is good, because it's true, and the last part is… he's an emotional twelve year old. And okay, yes, there's good reason for that, but if he wants this to work with MacKenzie she's going to deserve a hell of a lot better, even if she doesn't believe that she does.

She's going to read these fucking things in god knows how many minutes, and he's not leaving her with "loved" as the last thing she's gotten from him.

Will looks down at the next email draft on his BlackBerry—

_Dear MacKenzie,_

_I used to be so bitter about what we could have been, the love that we had. I'd look back and imagine we'd be six years married by now, with an Upper East Side brownstone and a couple of kids with pretentious names, and then I realized… that's not what I want anymore. Those aren't the people we are anymore. I let that go without even realizing it, because I like the people we are now. I wouldn't trade who we are now for what we could have had. I'm not that man any more than you are that woman, and I love the woman that you are now._

—and deletes it.

_Dear Kenzie._

Delete.

_Kenzie._

Okay.

He half-listens to Elliot and Sloan asking Charlie about Reese, who can't be found, and the hate group the FBI thinks the shooters—oh great, more than one, _three_ apparently with a fourth on the ground; he absently asks questions about that, nodding at the answers Charlie provides—belong to. Until Sloan groans, bending her head to rest her forehead on folded arms.

"What?" he asks, concern creeping up the length of his spine.

"Mac, she already blames herself for Genoa." Her phone vibrates in her head. _One new text message from… Don Keefer. _Will surmises that his phone isn't dead yet; he has a bit more time to write this email. "You've seen her, she hasn't slept in two weeks. She's killing herself over it."

The way she's looking at him suggests him to finish the thought he's been silently holding in his head for the past two weeks, maybe the past two months, past two years, unwilling to listen and unwilling to act, and he needs to—

(Mac tried to tie the loose ends together, and he didn't let her. And now, six years later she's still wandering around, and he's let her assume a mantle of guilt that would topple any lesser person; lesser people with Mac's obstinacy in mere halves or quarters, because if Will's honest with himself, everyone is less than half of what she is to him. And, if Will is honest with himself, that might have been one of the problems with their relationship to begin with.

Dulcinea, after all, was really just a barmaid named Aldonza.

He's let Mac believe she's entirely to blame for things. And no, she's not the woman he was in love with six years ago, but Will's not entirely certain he loved her, or rather he loved a woman he thought she was, six years ago. Dulcinea was a mere delusion of a knight errant, some woman with aspirations and strengths of her own that Don Quixote locked in his own ideological ivory tower.

Six years and self-crippling heartbreak later, its Aldonza Lorenzo that he loves, and that he knows is true.)

They are going to get out of here, and he is going to help Mac through this. She is his dearest partner and his best friend and he is going to be hers, and he let it fall this far, all because—

He didn't say it.

He looks back down at the screen.

_Kenzie_,

_Maybe I had been in love with the idea of you. Or the person you helped me be. But if I let what happened what, seven years ago? Destroy us—_

This isn't coming out right. Maybe he should stick to metaphors.

_Kenzie,_

_I just keep thinking—_

_Did you say it? Make a plan, set a goal, work towards it? All the loose ends we leave behind, unspooled threads of twine that tie us together, what do we do with them? We can all be left behind. Life doesn't just hand us light bulb moments. It makes us claw our way into realizations—cut the thread, or pull it back. We have to work for it._

_We have to do it ourselves. Make our own painful realizations, and pray that we aren't too late._

_Did you say it?_

_I've refused to let you tie up loose ends and instead I've let you take the blame for everything. And I didn't realize that you've been taking the blame for too much. I've made mistakes, Mac, and Genoa wasn't yours. You have my trust, and my love, for the rest of my life._

_I love you. I do love you. Past and present tense. And future tense. Every me loves every you. And you aren't entirely to blame, for anything. And I'm so fucking sorry, Kenz, that I've built it up to be that way. Who we were six years ago, what we were, wasn't perfect. If it had been perfect, then it wouldn't have destroyed us. And that's on me as much as it's on you._

_I used to be so bitter about what we could have been, what we could have had. I'd look back and imagine we'd be six years married by now, with an Upper East Side brownstone and a couple of kids with pretentious names, and then I realized… that's not what I want anymore. Those aren't the people we are anymore. I let that go without even realizing it, because I like the people we are now. I wouldn't trade who we are now, what we have now—the show, our friendship, our partnership, it seems so much more than what we had. It's not perfect, either, but I think we're both better for it. We're indestructible, Kenz. And I will never be happy with anyone else, so long as you walk the Earth. And I'm pretty fucking happy to hear that you are._

_Let's fix this._

_Will._

He stares at the email after signing off. Should he—_Love, Will?_ or sign it something else? She knows it's from him. He's only laying out his entire heart in an email, and its okay. And it is. It's going to be okay, because it's Mac and he loves and trusts her. Because he was her rebound and she fell in love with him and she made a mistake and she tried to fix it and is it really fucking worth it to spend the rest of his life in agony over the fact that Mac had been hurt and alone and didn't respect either of them enough to say no when he asked her out right after she had been dumped.

And, well, fuck if he hasn't done shitty things like that to her in the meantime.

He exhales, shakily, saving the draft. This is all-in. This is… he'll look at it again in ten minutes, and then…

He'll hit send.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	10. Chapter Ten

**A/N: **My apologies for such a long wait between chapters. Thanks to everyone who has waited, commented, left kudos, and bookmarked. On this Thanksgiving morning I am so thankful for all my readers. For the Americans here, I hope you have a wonderful day with your family and/or friends.

I'm especially thankful for (and I swear to God one day I will reply to reviews before I update with the next chapter, but today is not that day): **web3now**, **bulmerk**, **Ellie 5192**, **Tripple-A-Plus**, **bookofgwen**, **Eternally Romantic**, **fanficfanuk**, **TheGingerGuineaPig**, **Lattelady**, **awesomesausome**, **MoonlightGardenias**, **Clemence**, **ErynGrace**, and **myragumm**.

* * *

**CHAPTER TEN**

* * *

"Almost everyone's got it now," Neal says, watching the CNN live feed on his BlackBerry. "ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, they're all breaking in with it."

The scroll changes from _AWM BUILDING ON LOCKDOWN; THREE SHOOTERS IDENTIFIED, FOURTH ON THE GROUND _to _ACN'S NEWS NIGHT UNDER ATTACK; HOSTAGE SITUATION UNDER WAY. _

"Shit, wait, everyone shut up." Neal realizes a moment too late that no one was really talking, except Tamara, who is rather preoccupied with keeping Martin conscious. "I just—" He scrolls the volume up on the phone, feeling Tess and Gary press in closer to his shoulders. "Okay."

"This is Brooke Baldwin, and if you're just joining us, we're showing you the AWM building in New York City, headquarters to Atlantis Cable News. The building has been on lockdown for almost an hour now—at just past 1:20 anywhere between one to three gunmen opened fire on what we can now confirm to you _was_ the _News Night with Will McAvoy _newsroom. Shortly thereafter, _Right Now with Elliot Hirsch _was also a target of gun violence. We can confirm multiple fatalities and casualties, and with the building still on lockdown and the shooters still on the loose, emergency services have been unable to reach those wounded on the upper levels of the building."

"Tell me about it," Martin moans from his position on the floor, Tamara shushing him and pressing more ice to his head. _Tell me about it_, Neal echoes in his head. Mac's a hundred feet away, suffering in silence while he and Gary keep the peace in here.

_No one else knows, _Don had said. _Mac doesn't want anyone else to know. Especially Will. Especially—I cannot stress this enough—Will. _It makes sense, Neal understands rationally; Will finding out that Mac has been shot would only end with Will throwing lockdown protocol out the window. Although, Neal thinks, not like Don and Maggie didn't—this really only feels like the latest step in the danse de Will and MacKenzie.

Martin, Joey, Tess. They've got three of the wounded. And _News Night _has a staff of what—a hundred twelve? On a good day? And there are sixteen in the kitchen with him, and four in the bathroom with Don and Maggie, and now they've made contact with Will (Neal thinks that when they get out of here Will is going to go full McAvoy on everyone who kept this from him, but when it comes down to it, Mac's orders are Mac's orders), it's four in his. Leaving a shit ton of people unaccounted for.

Tess shifts uncomfortably next to him, trying to keep her upper body still. Neal shifts his weight a bit against her, turning the screen so she can see it better.

"We can also confirm that there is a hostage situation on the twenty-fourth floor, where I'm being told that _Right Now with Elliot Hirsch _is filmed, and I can confirm that President of AWM Reese Lansing is the hostage of the three gunmen who opened fire."

"Fucking hell," he mutters, and the entire room falls completely silent, even Joey, with a round to his shoulder. No one even dares to _breathe _loudly.

"We've been told that as of yet the gunmen have made no demands, but have confirmed to the police down on the ground here that Mr. Lansing is indeed the hostage. We do not know the location of Elliot Hirsch, Will McAvoy, Sloan Sabbith, or any of the ACN anchors and correspondents who reported on the now-defamed Genoa story," the entire room tenses collectively. _Yeah, the fucking Genoa story. _If he could, Neal would go back in time and have never found those tweets. (No, he wouldn't, which makes it all the more painful. It was the story. He wanted the story. They all wanted the story, a story.) "Which appears to be the catalyst for this horrific event. CNN has made several attempts to reach Jerry Dantana, the senior ACN producer reportedly responsible for the doctored footage that allowed the Genoa story to go to air, but neither he nor his lawyers have responded to our calls."

"Of course they fucking haven't," Tess seethes, others murmuring in agreement.

Tamara scoffs, Martin's head in her lap. "It's not like a cooked a fucking interview with a three-star general. No, he's the scapegoat, the rest of us are just up here in our ivory tower, having a laugh."

He remembers standing in Will's office, just a few hours before broadcast with the entire senior staff, and just… it was like a bomb detonated (he'd know), when Mac walked in with tears in her eyes and they all just… knew. There is a clear delineation—before Genoa was retracted, and after, and the past two weeks have been like ground zero of their careers, and for some, a whole lot more.

Mac's been taking it the worst, they all know it. You'd have to be blind to not see it.

(Even Will has noticed, which is both not surprising and completely shocking all at once, maybe because he's _acting_ on his feelings, pushing Mac through doorways with his hand on her elbow and making her eat regular meals and making no pretense of shoving into her office for the sole purpose of making sure she goes home after broadcasts, as if any of them are sleeping regularly, but Mac runs the ship and Will's the only one besides Jim and Charlie who can really get Mac to do anything she doesn't particularly want to, and it appears he's also the best at it, for reasons that no one has to guess.)

And now this. The shooting, Reese Lansing being taken hostage?

Jerry has fucking brought them this (not _to_ this, but brought them specifically here), and Neal almost wishes Mac hadn't fired him (and has wondered, more than once, sometimes over a beer with Martin and Jim at Hang Chews, what would have happened if she'd brought Jerry in front of Will, what kind of destruction Will and Mac would have wrought on him together) so that he could be here for _this_. Be here for Tess shifting painfully, Martin's rambling sentences and wide-blown pupils, Joey's grimaces, Gary's furtive glances at his phone and at the door, while they all sit here half-mad with fear because someone could come back, shoot open the lock, and they'd be dead in seconds.

_We're newsworthy. _

That's the only thing keeping this surreal enough that it's bearable. They're on the fucking news.

"We're going now to our correspondent Randi Kaye who is on the street in front of the AWM building in Manhattan. Randi, what can you tell us about this hostage situation?"

Fucking surreal.

"Hi, Brooke. Nothing is confirmed as of yet, but it appears from everything we've heard coming down the police scanner and from the Chief of Police himself that the gunmen, and we can confirm that much, that it is three white males, have situated themselves between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors of the AWM building here in midtown. The twenty-third floor is where _News Night _is filmed, and the twenty-fourth is where _Right Now with Elliot Hirsch _is filmed, and right between those two studios is where the gunmen are holding Reese Lansing, the President of AWM. His mother, CEO Leona Lansing, is on the scene here but is refusing to give us a comment, for obvious reasons."

"Between the floors," Gary says. "So they could come back at any time."

"Yeah—"

He doesn't quite know how he intended to finish that sentence. They can't prepare for this. You can't prepare for a bomb, or three guys with really big guns, or a senior producer desperate to win a Peabody. You can't.

"But what we _can_ talk about, what's interesting, is that there are reports of a white female in her late thirties with a gunshot wound to the right flank, which can mean anywhere from a punctured lung to serious abdominal bleeding, in the executive producer of _News Night_'s office. Now, of course, the executive producer of _News Night with Will McAvoy_ is MacKenzie McHale. Brooke, you and I both know MacKenzie, we worked with her in Atlanta back in 2006, and she fits the description coming down the police scanner—"

* * *

She's tired. She's tired, but she won't be another thing that happens to Jim, or Maggie, or Don. Her kids. She never had kids, had never really slowed down enough to think about wanting them (maybe a little, she slowed down a little with Will, but that doesn't really matter now, she thinks, or rather, doesn't think, letting the thought slip by like water through a sieve, like all of her thoughts right now, untethered and half-formed fragments she can't quite grasp), but she thinks Jim and Maggie are her kids, they're all her kids. She gave Don his first internship with ABC back in 1998 and Jim his first real break and Maggie the promotion to AP and they're hers, they're all hers. They're all she has left, really. _News Night_, and her staff.

MacKenzie wonders who will report on her death.

Will is okay, so she won't be an "also dead."

(_ACN news anchor Will McAvoy killed by gunman in today's shooting rampage in the AWM building in lower Manhattan. Also dead, desperate ex-girlfriend MacKenzie McHale._)

She might be important enough to be reported on.

(_News Night with Will McAvoy's executive producer MacKenzie McHale is first among the dead from today's shooting. McHale, who was thirty-eight, won multiple Peabodys on her work on the Middle East, although most recently has been in the news for her long and storied relationship with her partner-in-journalism and ex-boyfriend, Will McAvoy_—)

She thinks it might be good enough, all things considered. She'll leave behind the kids, they'll be her legacy. Hopefully they won't fuck up as badly as she has, hopefully they'll do the news well, and Maggie won't make her mistakes and Jim won't either and Don will tell Sloan he loves her and Will will—

He'll—

She's tired.

She can't really feel her legs.

She can't really feel anything at all.

* * *

"Mac?"

He tries to shake her awake, paying no mind to how his voice shakes.

The gaps in her consciousness are getting longer and longer, and Jim knows they're running out of dressings for her to bleed through. She hasn't moved in a few minutes, and Jim thinks that might be the most terrifying thing of all. Mac, she's—frenetic, he thinks, an unstoppable force of energy and light and goodness and she's _Mac. _The juggernaut of journalism or some other hokey title and she's—

He's going to get out of here and punch Will in the face, promises and deference to Mac be damned.

"I need to get to New York," she mumbles under her breath, eyes moving rapidly under lavender-hued lids. The words tip out from between half-closed lips, and she coughs violently, her stomach muscles fluttering under ashen, taut skin. "I need to—I need to get to—"

"We did," Jim whispers, grabbing her hand tighter, leaning in closer, until he can feel her breath on his cheek, his mouth inches away from her ear. "We went to New York, Mac, we did."

She doesn't stop.

"Northwestern, he saw me," she whispers, voice reedy and thin but insistent, eyes flickering open and closed, unfocused, yet certain. "He saw—and he wants—he wants me—I need to get to New York—I need to get to—I need to take the job—I need to—Northwestern—it's not, but it can be—I'll stay—"

"Mac," he strokes her hair, one hand pressed on her side, and it's wet, his palms slick with sweat and blood and it's fucking freezing in here and she's lost so much blood, and Jim has her wrapped in the fire blanket but it's not enough, it's not… he forces himself to take a breath, take his eyes off her, look at Don who has his BlackBerry poised against his lips, eyes to the ceiling, in contrast to Maggie who can't take her eyes off them, hands skittering backwards against the wall every few minutes, like a wary animal waiting to take flight. "Mac, we got to New York. You got back to Will. He—he forgives you, Mac. He's thirty feet away. You gotta hold on, it's gonna be okay, he's gonna get here."

Her BlackBerry chimes.

_One new email. _

"It's gonna be okay," he whispers, holding the phone just in his line of sight as he bends over her still, lips less than an inch from her sweat-beaded forehead.

His hands are shaking, and just, _fuck_.

_I'll make the call_. He'd thought that, over an hour ago.

He looks at Maggie, whose eyes are questioning and desperate, who needs to believe that this email is from Will and it'll be enough to make Mac come back from this edge she's walking on, because if Mac can come back from this than they can all come back from it, and Maggie can come back from Africa. And if Will can forgive Mac then Lisa can forgive Maggie and it has to work out and Jim knows the feeling. This has to work out, because most of fucking all he can't lose Mac, he can't fucking lose her because she's his best friend and his big sister and he's followed her everywhere but she's always, _always_, protected him and he can't—

He _won't. _

"Wake up, Mac."

He shakes her awake.

"It's from Will, Mac, come on."

* * *

**Thanks for reading! Have a happy holiday! **


	11. Chapter Eleven

**A/N: **So, this chapter turned out to be a bit of a beast. I'm sure no one will complain about extra length, though. Thanks as usual to lilacmermaid25 for the beta! Also, as a note, the last chapter and the next few chapters are all pretty much happening concurrently over the course of maybe ten or twenty minutes. Also, for reference, only about an hour and twenty minutes has passed so far.

Thanks to **EternallyRomantic**, **Atomix330**, **TheGingerGuineaPig**, **Tripple-A-Plus**, **Emeinthetardis**, **Ellie 5192**, **fanficfanuk**, **millie-zhang-scu**,** Raspberry Not Pink**, **MoonlightGardenias**, **Guest**, and **Clemence**, who may feel free to call me "girl" anytime I emotionally traumatize her.

* * *

**CHAPTER ELEVEN**

* * *

"Mac, wake up, come on, Mac—_MacKenzie_, please." Maggie wipes her eyes and crawls across the floor, coming to Mac's other side.

There's blood everywhere, or so it seems. The world has condensed to this one little point, this little patch of floor and this woman. Maggie looks down and her hands are covered in blood. The front of her shirt, too. It's probably in her hair; she can't stop touching it—pulling it away from her face, carding her fingers through the knotted blonde strands. Maggie wonders who's going to scrub the blood out of the grout, where it's all over the tile floor.

(She grew up on a farm. She's seen pigs slaughtered, watched as her father's farmhands slit their throats and blood, so dark it was almost black, pooled out onto the gravel. She's never really considered how much blood is in the human body.)

"Mac," she whispers, touching her shoulder. "Mac, Will sent you another email. Don't you want to hear it?"

Her eyes flutter.

_Please, Lord_, Maggie prays. _Please, just let her live. Don't take her now. _

She doesn't… Maggie doesn't have the greatest relationship with her mother. She'd conceded to a school with a shittier journalism program when she had gained admission to the University of Missouri Columbia and Northwestern and stayed at home, helped with the farm. She had gone to a state school nearby like her mother had wanted, in a last-ditch attempt to make things right with her, and then after four years of listening to her mother… she stopped, and the criticism just kept coming.

So she packed up her things and got the job as a _News Night _intern, and then somehow clambered her way up to being Will McAvoy's rather _ad hoc _assistant—even if he didn't know her name for almost a year, she was his assistant and that wasn't nothing, and she was dating an Executive Producer and she'd tried to show it all off to her mother, make her see she could make it, and…

And then her father passed away—heart attack while walking in the woods that surround their twenty acres, found hours too late for anything to be done—last year, so she doesn't even have him anymore. Her mother hasn't spoken to her since.

All she has to her name is $28,000 of college loan debt and her miserable bedroom in her miserable apartment and few friends, all because she made all the wrong decisions. All by herself, too.

Mac was the first person to believe in her. Mac was the one who hoisted her up from assistant to associate producer, who taught her almost everything she knows. Who let her go to Africa and… who saved her life. Mac's only twelve years older than her, but she's… maybe not _more _of a mother, but maybe the mother she used to wish that she could have. Someone who has… faith in her ability to grow and who still, despite that faith, wants to be a safety net. A protector. Maggie doesn't have many people anymore, but she still has Mac.

Mac came back for her.

_Dear Lord, you have given me back my life. If this was your sign, I get it, it's time to get off the mat and start doing my job and living my life again. _She recognizes that there are tears dripping down her nose, and she swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, gently holding onto Mac's shoulder. _But save her too. Lord, please save her. I know you're not cruel, Lord. Save her. If not for me, for Will. And Jim. Please save her. You've taken Daniel, and who knows how many people on this day. Please just save her. Please Lord, hear my prayer. _

"Please, Mac."

Mac's eyes slit open, a low sound coming from her throat that Maggie realizes is her attempt at talking.

Jim shushes Mac, bending over her and framing her face with his hands, a look of relief washing the tension, however briefly, off his features. He sends Maggie a look of thanks, and she gives him a tiny smile.

Mac had come to her a few weeks after Africa, after the debriefing memo on the catastrophe that had been her trip had passed through HR and legal and found its way to the EP's desk._ Jim gave me this_, she had said, pressing something into Maggie's hand during a quiet moment after most of the staff had cleared out for Hang Chew's. _While we were in Afghanistan, for Christmas. We… it's a long story, but he knew it meant something to me. I'm sure you can figure out why. _Mac had smiled softly, and Maggie was struck by how… still, she had seemed, then, and wondered if this was what it was like to peel away at the frenetic producer to get at the MacKenzie that Will and Jim clearly knew. Softer, stiller, but still brilliant. _I think you need it more than me right now. _

Maggie had looked down at the object Mac had placed in her hands.

A St. Jude's medallion.

_Causes are only lost when we give up. _And then Mac had squeezed her wrist, smiled softly again, and disappeared back into her office. _You'll come back. Just give it time. _

Will had been at home with Nina that night.

Had Mac already given up, then? On Will?

Maggie wishes that she had kept the medallion, a shiny little brass thing on a gold chain, around her neck, instead of her desk drawer. She had been… when the gunshots started going off… she had gone back for it, but fell, and froze. And Mac had come back to get her.

_Causes are only lost when we give up._

She won't give up. Not on Mac.

* * *

They've jammed the cell signal in the building. Don's covered enough hostage situations to know that this is pretty much just Standard Operating Procedure, but now he's cut off from dispatch and Sloan, and he knows they're going to cut the Wi-Fi soon and now Jim and Maggie won't even have the small hope of tempting Mac to stay alive with Will's desperate emails.

_So, Jerry fucking Dantana, huh?_

Maybe Mac should have paid attention more to Jerry committing the sin of not being Jim. Maybe they all should have. It's probably a pretty good rule to have, Don thinks. Jim spent three years following Mac through warzones and the Green Zone, sleeping in hostels and caves and the back of Jeeps and Humvees and bunks on bases. Jim's a good man in a fight.

Jim is standing by.

Not that he's bitter about it, or that he thinks he ever really was, but Don understands now, why Maggie left him for Jim.

Don knows he has to tell them—that the cell signal's been blocked, that the internet's next, that Reese Lansing is being held hostage in the stairwell on _this _fucking floor, of course, and that… Mac's probably not getting out of here, unless SWAT pulls the Hail Mary to end all Hail Marys. And that Will's probably about to find out, because CNN started the speculation that the gunshot victim is Mac, and now two other major stations are running with it, and Sloan already knows and she can't lie with her face worth a damn, and even though it's something he typically loves about her it's pretty goddamn inconvenient at the moment.

And Jerry fucking Dantana still has no fucking comment.

A cough draws Don out of his stupor. Mac's been coughing on and off for the past ten minutes, little ones, but this one sounds different. He doesn't know what it means, except _bad_, and when they start wracking her body Mac seems well and truly awake for the first time in at least half an hour.

He can't help but feel a shock of pride when Maggie's face steels and she and Jim help Mac sit up. Don scrambles to his feet, grabbing one of the towels they had used to cool Mac down and skittering forward to help her press it to her mouth, folding his hand around hers. The blanket falls to skirt around her waist, and Don does a quick check to make sure that the dressings haven't bled through yet. They haven't, and he sends up a quick prayer of thanks to a God he hasn't been too sure that he believes in in recent years.

But when the coughing subsides, and he pulls the towel away from her mouth, it's red with blood.

* * *

Don's face freezes, stunned distress contorting his features, and when Maggie lays Mac down onto the floor it only takes Jim a few seconds to see why. Don staring at the towel, Maggie's small gasp of horror—he doesn't waste time looking at the towel in Don's hand, just turns to Mac for confirmation, blinking back his own horror at the blood on her lips and teeth.

_We need to get her out. Now. _

And then they notice one more thing, their backs stiffening against the noise that was hidden under Mac's coughing.

Maggie shakes her head, grabbing the towel out of Don's hand to dab at Mac's mouth, flinching every time a gun goes off, not too far in the distance.

"Sorry," Mac mumbles.

Maggie shushes her before he can get the chance, grabbing Mac's phone from where he had let it clatter to the floor. Unlocking it (Jim faintly thinks that if they're getting out of here, which the sound of distant gunfire signals no, but he's not adverse to hope in desperate situations and seemingly-lost causes, that Mac is going to have to change her password ASAP) Maggie settles down low next to Mac, and quickly scans the new email before opening her mouth to read it aloud.

_Good thinking_. He wishes he had done it for Will's last, for "loved." God, she would have been better off just with the first one. Mac's far enough gone that she doesn't notice what Maggie's doing or the smile growing on Maggie's face, but Jim sees it and for the first time in a long time, thinks he sees the girl he had a crush on once upon a time back in the room with him.

"Kenzie," Maggie murmurs, brushing her hair behind her ear. "I just keep thinking—"

He has every intention of paying attention until Don nudges him, and after gaining his attention, canting his head towards his phone.

_CELL SERVICE, INTERNET CUT OFF AT AWM BUILDING; FBI COMMENTS THIS IS SOP; AWM HOSTAGE SITUATION NOW CLASSIFIED AS ACT OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM. _

Shit.

"I think that hit the wire before they could actually do it, because I can still get internet. Can't text though." They both look up when the gunfire ceases. Don turns so his face is directed away from Mac and Maggie. "They've also started speculating on who's been injured. Our call came down the police scanner several times, and now there are people naming the gunshot victim as Mac. The Wi-Fi's not down yet, or at least not entirely, cause I'm still getting it to work on my phone, but Will, Sloan, and Elliot all have their phones and sooner or later someone's gonna email them for confirmation that it's Mac, or one of them is gonna log onto one of the stations saying it's Mac, and I'm saying—maybe we should try to get an email to them, before everything goes down entirely."

"But Mac said—" Jim starts to say without even realizing, before cutting himself off and shaking his head. "No, yeah, we should."

"He should have the chance to…"

_Say goodbye. _

Jim wants to laugh. And cry. And be angry. This is so fucked up. And then, he hears—

"I love you. I do love you. Past and present tense. And future tense." Both he and Don turn. Maggie's smile is a mile wide, and Mac has gotten some of the fight back in her eyes, even if her body is quaking and she's as pale as a sheet. "Every me loves every you. And you aren't entirely to blame, for anything. And I'm so fucking sorry, Kenz, that I've built it up to be that way. Who we were six years ago, what we were, wasn't perfect. If it had been perfect, then it wouldn't have destroyed us. And that's on me as much as it's on you."

Maggie's brow furrows, and her voice is more serious when she continues reading the email. "I used to be so bitter about what we could have been, what we could have had. I'd look back and imagine we'd be six years married by now, with an Upper East Side brownstone and a couple of kids with pretentious names," her voice pitches higher again, "and then I realized… that's not what I want anymore."

It takes Jim a long moment to realize that Don is watching him. Ruffling a hand through his hair, he turns back to Don. Mac taught him how to think on his feet, it's their job to pivot.

"Write the email, quickly," he murmurs. "Sloan has her phone, right? Send it to her; tell her to have Charlie break it to him."

The gunfire starts up again, and the three of them flinch.

Don nods, but then hesitates. It's so unlike him that Jim feels his insides coil tightly in dreadful anticipation. "What?"

"Reese Lansing was taken hostage. They're holding him in the stairwell between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors. The elevators have been shut down. That's why—" The gunfire escalates in its rapidity, cutting off Don's train of thought.

"Jesus Christ, how much ammo do they have?" Jim mutters.

"Yeah," Don agrees mindlessly, and then refocuses. "That's why they've shut down the cell service and internet. To force them to use a landline, make sure they're not making calls out. SOP."

Jim already knows that part of police procedure, they've already had this conversation in fewer words, but he gives Don a curt nod anyway.

"Okay."

"Okay."

And then, a moment later:

"_Shit_."

Don holds up his BlackBerry for him to see. _Network not found_. "Okay." Jim licks his lips. "Okay. I'm not sending anyone out there knowing the gunmen can just step through the door and see us. We just…"

Jim stands, raking a hand through his hair before setting his hands on his hips. Mac looks like she's slipping out of consciousness again, and Jim feels a surge of adrenaline, of fear, of alarm, pool in his stomach. When will they stop being able to wake her? He notices that Maggie had stopped reading to dab at Mac's mouth again, the cloth coming away bloodier than before.

_It's in her lung. _

She's going to stop breathing. Either because the bullet in her lung is going to cause pneumothorax or because the lung tissue is going to die and cease to be functional. Or because she's going to lose so much blood that there isn't enough oxygen going to her brain. Pressing a hand to his forehead, Jim wills himself to stop chasing the possibilities.

Causes are only lost when they give up on them.

"We make her comfortable."

Maggie wraps the towel around Mac's hand, and picks up the phone again. "And I will never be happy with anyone else, so long as you walk the Earth. And I'm pretty fucking happy to hear that you are. Let's fix this. Love, me. Well, Will. You know."

"How?" Don asks, tracking his eyes from Maggie back to Jim.

He licks his lips again, thinking. "Her couch is only a few feet outside the door. Grab the cushions and pillows. We should see how far we can get the phone on her door to go, maybe we can make another call to dispatch."

"And…" Don looks back to Mac and Maggie. "When it comes to it?"

Jim sets his jaw. Will loves her. Even if Will didn't, if Mac asked for him, he would have gotten him. "I'll get him. When it comes to it. I'm going to… when she asks, I'll go. _I _will go."

Don nods circumspectly, biting his lip.

The gunfire, once again, has stopped.

* * *

**Thanks for reading! **


	12. Chapter Twelve

**A/N: **Hi! It's the last week of classes and I have a major paper due Thursday, but I've worked ahead a bit so you should have an update tomorrow as well, and then I'll see what I can get done Thursday after class. Friday is LDOC, so I'll be drunk off my ass, but that also tends to inspire updates, so hopefully there'll be another chapter ready to post by Saturday and then it's finals week so it'll be a crapshoot on whether or not I'll be able to update before December 12, which is my last final.

_Casual reminder_ that in the first chapter I trigger warned for gun violence, child abuse, and alcohol abuse, because that's relevant again.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter! I get out of class at 3:20EST so I'll get back to you then, I just wanted to get this posted ASAP.

* * *

**CHAPTER TWELVE**

* * *

The door is open a crack behind them, and Mac can hear Maggie and Jim's muffled movements from the other side. There'd been a brief, terse, and moderately loud argument about who would go, and eventually Maggie had put her foot down and she and Jim had gone out together.

"Hey," Don says, leaning down over her. "You stay awake."

Barely, but that's not the point. It's strange, because her body feels farther away from her than her thoughts.

"Trying," she murmurs. She is. She really is. It's getting harder and harder to breathe, harder to breathe than it is during an anxiety attack, or the crush of panic that would well up in her chest the first few times they were shot at in Afghanistan, or Will telling her that he would call her a cab and that she should leave.

And it's not even… like it hurts, anymore. She just feels so tired, like she's sluggishly whirring down to a standstill. She can feel every wheel being slowed, the seconds stretching out before her, long, and each moment more out of reach than the last.

Will loves her. More importantly, Will forgives her. Although she should probably be a little bit pissed that it took them being shot at to get him to get there, she's strangely at peace with it.

If she's going to die, she's going to die knowing that the man she's been in love with for almost eight years loves her back.

It's going to be enough. It has to be enough.

"I won't insult you by asking how you're feeling," he says next, squeezing her hand.

She almost smiles. Or at least tries to. "Very… very kind."

She's determined to die happily. Bravely. Even if she's bleeding out in a tiny corner of the world, like a cornered animal, she's surrounded by her friends. And she's put many things to rights, but Will matters the most. And Jim and Don will take care of Maggie. And they'll all take care of Will.

Who loves her. And forgives her.

Their family. They'll take care of each other. That's what she'll leave behind. The family, the home here, that she and Will built. Their show, their baby. Their legacy. She hopes it will be enough for him.

(She's not afraid to die. But she is afraid. For him.

They wasted so much time.)

Mac can taste the blood on her teeth, and then feels nothing for a little while, letting the protracted seconds stretch out infinitely, until time slips between her fingers and into nothingness.

The minutes tick by with interminable slowness, and now it seems like they're never going to get out. Will feels like he's going to crawl out of his skin.

He considers himself pretty adept at handling almost anything, but despite growing up on a farm, in an area where hunting was prevalent, he's shit at handling the sound of gunfire. And it's not like his father was a… gun enthusiast, but there were definitely guns in the house.

(He would get them into the room he shared with Michael. Put them in the closet, if it got loud enough. Put on a record, sing in Fiona's ear to keep her calm. And with little over nine years between them, Fi was always more like his kid than his kid sister. Liz would just hide under his bed, fingers jammed in her ears, humming tunelessly to drown out the shouts and screams out. It was easier, almost, when John drank more. At least by the time he stumbled home, everyone was in bed, or pretending to be. And if not, he was easier to dodge, sloppy and uncoordinated as he was. Even his verbal barbs were less precise, less hard-hitting, than when he was home during harvest, and mostly sober.)

And he would worry, of course, as a kid, about the guns in the house. And knives. But his father generally preferred his fists to anything else. John McAvoy was very much a man's man in that way, rarely using anything but his own fists to beat his wife and children.

Until the night he decided to pick up his hunting rifle and aim it at his wife. At the first shot, Will had foisted Fi into Lizzie's arms and bolted down the stairs to see his mother gripping her side (a graze, only a graze, and she'd screamed at him to get back upstairs, face pale with fear, and John had rounded on him) and the bottle had been mostly empty and within reach.

(It had surprised him, when it broke across John's face, and he just kept swinging and the police actually showed up, ten minutes later. He'd coaxed little Fiona out of Lizzie's arms, who promptly curled around him and refused to let go. He buried his face in her curly blonde hair until someone got around to asking him for a statement.)

He doesn't like guns.

But Mac's okay, he keeps reminding himself.

None of them feel like talking, now that cell service and internet has been cut, now that they know it'll probably be hours, not minutes, until they're out of here. Now that AWM has, quite clearly, been brought to its knees. Because, well, shit, Will's never particularly liked Reese Lansing, but as far as a president of a company goes, he objectively knows that Reese is a good one. And he'd never wish anything like this on Leona.

But Mac's okay. She's okay. They're going to get out of here and she's going to be okay, even if she hasn't been the past couple of weeks, since the retraction. She's physically okay. And if she got the emails. If they did go out to get her phone and maybe she feels the same way, and even if she doesn't that's okay too. He doesn't care anymore because he's going to be in love with her for the rest of his life. She waited three years; he can wait for her too.

(He still has to tamp down on the urge to bolt to her every time a gun goes off in the stairwell. All things considered, he thinks he would have that impulse no matter what, to get to her, to get to MacKenzie.)

Elliot clears his throat. "A buddy of mine at CNN says he's got a report of a white female, late thirties, on twenty-third floor in the executive producer's bathroom with a GSW to the right flank."

Sloan reacts first—before he can, because his thoughts have come to a stuttering halt—voice sudden and sharp. "What?"

"I'm going through my text messages, I missed this one," he says, growing confused and concerned, voice changing to that flustered tone he'd used on the air when Sweeney disclosed the TBI, and Will can't think at all. "It says white female, late thirties, twenty-third floor, with a gunshot wound to the right flank. Location is the executive producer's bathroom. It came down the police scanner, and… and they're speculating that it's Mac."

She's okay. She has to be okay, otherwise he's going to—

"It's not, Don said she's okay. Don said they're all okay. They must have gotten the floor wrong." He recognizes, a little too late, the panic in his voice, and Sloan grips his arm in response, dropping her BlackBerry onto the floor beside her.

But Elliot continues, frowning and sounding a bit disoriented. "No, I've—I've got another one, Diane Sawyer's EP. She says they've got confirmation. She's not saying where from, so I don't know if—"

"When did you get that?" Sloan's hands grip his arm harder.

"I… fifteen minutes ago," Elliot answers. "All our phones have been blowing up; I've just been answering my wife."

"Will." His eyes are hopelessly fixed on Elliot's phone and Sloan is the only thing keeping him from lunging across the room. "_Will_." It takes Charlie raising his voice in the small room—the word echoing on industrial tile and then Elliot and Sloan's chorusing silence—to get Will to tear his eyes away from Elliot to meet Charlie's gaze. "I'm sure Mac is fine."

"You said," he starts, trying to fight off Sloan's hands on his bicep. "You said there weren't any serious injuries on this floor. You spoke to Leona. The Chief of Police. You said—"

And now it's in his head—

MacKenzie in pain, MacKenzie bleeding, MacKenzie cold and pale and quiet, MacKenzie writhing in agony and screaming.

Charlie's face smooths out, calm and reassuring. "Yes, Will. And it's not MacKenzie—"

But it's not enough. He's known Charlie for ten years. He knows. _He knows_. He knows that Mac would tell Don to lie to Sloan, he knows Mac would protect him, he knows _Mac_, and she would rather die alone to keep him safe and he _knows _Charlie would too and he knows."You're lying."

"No, Will—"

Sloan, she has the texts from Don, she'd know, she wouldn't lie to him, not about Mac, she'd know—

"Charlie…" she says slowly, shaking her head.

"Sloan," Charlie answers meaningfully, and suddenly they're all getting to their feet. He has a vague idea that Elliot's sizing him up, that Sloan's slowly turning from Charlie back to him, fingernails curling into his arm. He puts his hand over hers, trying to take it off. "Will."

"What did the text messages say, Sloan?" he asks, when she refuses to let go, and her face falters before the fierce look she dons for broadcast slides into place.

"Mac is fine," she repeats, drawing the words out, looking him square in the eye. "Don said that she is fine, they are safe."

"Let me see your phone," he says, barely cognizant of the fact that his voice is shaking. Sloan's broadcast face tightens for a moment, hardening over her features before faltering again. She tries to put the facade back into place, but it dies completely. "Sloan. What did he say?"

Her eyes flick back to Charlie before she turns her face back to him.

"Don't look at—"

"_Will_," Charlie shouts.

"Don't fucking lie to me about Mac!" he roars, barely registering the volume of his words.

"It's not serious," she tells him, finally, in a rush, eyes wide and helpless. "It's not serious, he said it's not serious—"

_You're lying_, he thinks, or maybe says.

Her arms try to slide around his waist but she's not quick enough, or strong enough, but her hands don't get any traction, and it's Elliot who winds up grabbing him, ripping him back from the door with his hand on the handle and he curses, palm stinging and Elliot pulls him to face Charlie.

"If you think I'm letting you go out there when it's open fucking season on the big names of ACN, you're crazy," Charlie tells him, directing Elliot to back him into a corner. He doesn't even notice Sloan edging towards the door, putting her back to the door to block his exit, hands behind her, gripping the door knob tightly. "The gunmen are a hundred feet away from this bathroom. I am not letting you go out there, William."

"MacKenzie—"

"Do you really think she wants you risking your life for hers?" Charlie shouts. "She lied to you, Will. She did it for a reason."

"Do you think I give a fuck?" Elliot's arms are tight around him, and he remembers some long-ago, faraway conversation about high school sports and how Elliot used to wrestle. "Do you really think I give a single fuck—"

"Sloan, what did Don tell you?" Charlie asks, calmly.

Her eyes shift back and forth between him and Charlie, like she's unsure, but when she speaks her voice is certain. "That it was Mac's orders not to tell anyone, but she's been shot. Nowhere serious, but she's in a lot of pain, which is why she didn't answer her phone when you called her right after it happened. She's—she's read the emails."

He feels himself go slack in Elliot's grip.

Mac was shot. Mac's in a lot of pain. He needs to—he has to—

"Is that all that Don said?" Charlie asks, but Will hears it as if it's a hundred miles away, as if Charlie's hands aren't on his shoulders.

Sloan nods. "That's all he said."

They don't understand. He doesn't care if it's not serious. He doesn't fucking care if it's a gunshot wound, a graze, or a goddamn paper cut. MacKenzie is hurt, and he's not there. MacKenzie is hurt, and he broke a bottle across a man's face when he was ten, he will go out there. He will get to her. He is going to get to her. It's MacKenzie. It's a physical law of the universe, he's going to get to her.

"She was shot," Will echoes, almost emptily, and feels Charlie tighten his grip on his shoulders.

And then he feels all the tension subside from his body before surging, exploding, and he pulls out of Elliot's grasp, and he feels hands on him again, but he needs to get to her, she's in pain and he's not there—

Sloan's in front of the door, but he can move her—

Charlie has his wrist and Elliot has his arm, but he can shake them off, and then its thirty feet to MacKenzie's office—

He hears Charlie and Elliot shouting his name; sees a brief look of remorse cross Sloan's face. And then a moment, later his bad knee gives out from under him and Sloan's falling down with him, or maybe she's not falling, just following, but she kicked his knee out from under him and everything kind of comes to a dead stop, the bathroom filled only by the sound of his Elliot's heavy breathing and own pained cries.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**A/N: **Managed to squeeze out another chapter during finals. Not sure if I'll be able to do another one before Friday night, but I do have a bit of free time tomorrow night so we'll see. Don't hold your breath, though. Also as a quick note: please remember this story is written in third person limited, and so there are reliable and unreliable narrators, and at this point everyone is cut out from the outside world, so you are as well, and some people know more about what's going on than others. (For instance, Charlie is holding a lot more cards than Will.)

Thanks go out to: **jacobn**, **TheGingerGuineaPig**, **fanficfanuk**, **Jacks in my head**, **Tripple-A-Plus**, **awesomesausome**, **Sarah**, **Guest**, **Clemence**,** cybercat08**, and** rachellehr16** for reviewing the last chapter!

* * *

**CHAPTER THIRTEEN:**

* * *

"I get it, I get it now. Why people have the… sin of not being Jim." Don doesn't particularly know why he's still talking, Mac's been nonresponsive for about five minutes now, and maybe it's because Maggie and Jim are outside in Mac's office, trying to figure out how to get her phone to reach all the way into the bathroom, because there's been a lull in the gunfire…

"He's your guy. Like… damn, Jim." She looks peaceful, except for the uneven rising and falling of her chest, she looks peaceful. Don decides he doesn't like it. "All though I guess you really did mean it when you said you trusted me with your life. I hope you're right about that, cause I'm not gonna lie to you Mac, right now it's looking pretty bad."

He looks down at her, trying to remember what she looked like when he first met her. Longer hair. Fewer lines on her face. Thinner, in some ways. Just back from eighteen months covering the First Chechen War with _World News_' newest EP. A little young to be a Senior Producer, they'd all thought.

"But you know what, no. We're gonna get out of this, and I'm going to punch Jerry Dantana in the throat, and then get it done with Sloan in a spectacular fashion. And then you—you are gonna marry Will and have dozens of fat, happy, little McAvoy babies."

He smiles, dipping his chin—Mac's eyes are fluttering open.

_You know that Genoa isn't all your fault, right? _There's nothing he can say that will convince her. He just wants to take her mind off it.

"Hey."

"Dozens?" she rasps, the veins of her throat lining each and every struggling breath she takes. There's blood in her teeth, but at this moment, Don feels like smiling, remembering the twenty-four year old Senior Producer who had interviewed him, given him an internship, shown him a newsroom for the first time in his life almost fifteen years ago. Who had sworn up and down that she would never get married, never slow down, would be as changeable and irrepressible as the news cycle. Never to be tied down. MacKenzie McHale would be the best producer in broadcast journalism and fuck the rest.

An unstoppable force.

"Fat and happy."

"All right then…" she says, voice drifting off, eyes fluttering close again. They both know that between the stabbing and now this… kids aren't in her future. Even so, they'd had this discussion a couple times, late at night at Hang Chews…

_Don and MacKenzie's Lonely Hearts Club_, she once called it, after a fair few drinks, sinking into the couch cushions and his side.

She's still unstoppable. He believes that, if nothing else.

MacKenzie McHale is an unstoppable force. And Will McAvoy is an immovable object. And the two of them are a fixed point in the universe. Meeting each other doesn't make them any less of the other thing, it just makes them immutable.

"You know, Maggie, and Neal, and Gary, and Jenna…"

He thinks he sees the ghost of a smile, before the lines on her face smooth out again. Maggie and Jim slip back into the room, closing the door and locking it. Looking up at them, he tries to wipe the strange smile he knows must be on his face. He nods at the couch cushions piled against the wall.

"Let's do this before she wakes up again, it'll hurt less."

* * *

She's been shot.

MacKenzie's been shot. MacKenzie is lying on her bathroom floor, bleeding, a bullet lodged in her body. She is thirty feet away from him. Bleeding. And in pain.

And everyone's been lying to him.

Charlie and Sloan knew. They knew, and they lied to him.

God, he's been a fucking idiot. About a lot of things, and it makes him want to throw up (that, and the fact that his knee's on fucking fire and his thigh is protesting as well.)

He's wasted so much time. And he—he knows Mac is thinking this, her being shot, is some sort of cosmic balancing. The past two weeks she's born the entire weight of Genoa like a mantle upon her shoulders, waiting for her—her punishment. From him. Like every stupid fucking thing he's done to her over the past two and a half years. Did he teach her that? He's let her take a hundred percent of the blame for the current state of their relationship for six years.

Did she think she deserved to be stabbed, too? Does she think this is just round two? Guilt, Will realizes, has become the bedrock of MacKenzie's psyche. It's selfish of her, he thinks, in some ways, but fuck if he isn't in others.

The ring.

The fucking ring, his stunt with Brian Brenner, and him throwing the emails back in her face.

_I'm impressed it doesn't happen more often, _like he deserved a fucking award for not heaping guilt onto her head on a daily basis. Of course. Of fucking course.

"The police report wouldn't get it wrong. Dispatch wouldn't get it wrong."

He doesn't quite realize that he's crying, or that he's half on Sloan's lap, or that Sloan's crying too, her arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders as she argues about something with Charlie.

Sloan wavers. "Why would Don lie to me, though?"

"The real question is why would Mac tell Don to lie to you."

_I'm impressed_. And instead of examining the fact that he felt like complete shit for doing that to her, he just ran away from it and dated Nina Howard, while Mac stood by. Because despite her brief relationship with Wade Campbell (fuck, does she think she deserved what he did to her, too?) she hasn't been with anyone since they broke up almost six years ago. At least he's pretty sure that she hasn't.

"I guess… I guess because if it was serious, I wouldn't have lied to you about it. I wouldn't have lied to Will about it, because I knew…"

"Well, we just saw that he'd—Will, can you hear me?"

Fuck.

"I think he's in shock. And pain. I kicked him pretty hard."

"Yeah, I saw that."

Did he date Nina Howard for the same reasons that Mac started dating him?

"I don't think Mac knew that Don told me."

"Why?"

"It seemed more like Don had a motive than Mac."

"Again, why?"

"Don wanted Will to send her another email."

_Fuck._

Except he didn't fall in love with Nina Howard. And Nina_ knew_, going in, that he was—is—in love with Mac, but still… and he didn't physically cheat on Nina, or Mac, but…

Fuck.

Just… fuck. He fucked up. He fucked up and Mac's been shot. He doesn't give a single fuck about what Don told Sloan or what Mac told Don to tell Sloan, she's been shot and it's serious. And she cares enough to try to keep him safe, but he needs to get there, he needs to get to her. She's in pain and he needs to get to her because she's probably blaming herself, because she might think she deserves this, and if she does think that it's his fault. Maybe not a hundred percent, but some of that blame is allotted out to him and she's bleeding and he just wants to be there to hold her.

MacKenzie's in pain and there's nothing he can do to make it better.

And, odds are, even if he _had_ gotten it into his head that he's forgiven her, maybe has forgiven her for a while, and ran away from it (to Nina, to a whole slew of other things) consciously before today, before an hour and a half ago… he still wouldn't be able to do anything to make it better.

It doesn't matter that she's read the emails.

He needs to get to her.

The ten year old boy in him rears his head again, unable to stay hiding in the closet or under the bed. The gun's gone off and he needs to get to her, long-ingrained impulses creeping under his skin, malformed survival instincts pushing him to take flight, to fight, where others usually run. The same survival instinct that's kept him from forgiving MacKenzie, trusting MacKenzie. The gun's gone off and he knows she's not the one holding it, she's the one he's trying to get to. She's always been the one he's trying to get to.

And she's been trying to get to him for much, much longer.

"CNN reported it," Elliot says, still scrolling through what Will distantly heard a few minutes is hundreds of emails. He should check his own email. "I can't fucking—they reported her location."

"What?" Will belatedly realizes that he's sitting up, and that Sloan is letting him.

"CNN ran with the report on the police scanner, the whole thing, including her location." Elliot's thumb keeps moving quickly over the scroll on his BlackBerry. "Executive producer's office. The segment only ran once before they pulled the details, but they fucking, are they that fucking stupid?"

A look of shock slides onto Charlie's face. "Leona didn't confirm it. I know she didn't."

"They ran it unconfirmed." Elliot looks up from his phone. "And then someone higher up had them retract it almost immediately and issue an apology. Anderson Cooper emailed me."

His knee is still throbbing, but Will makes an attempt at standing up, his head spinning and stomach lurching, trying to piece the past twenty, thirty, minutes together. "The gunshots earlier, you don't think—"

"Those were farther away, Will," Sloan tells him, her voice consoling, soft, and still constricted with emotion. "We would have heard them, if they went back—if they went back for—"

His heart is pounding in his chest, the icy grip of fear stretched between his lungs. Charlie's tone is firm, but conciliatory, and it doesn't help, doesn't stop his head from spinning, running through every possibility, and his mind can't provide any stronger argument than _this is MacKenzie._

"They are in the stairwell, with Reese Lansing. SWAT knows that, the police know that. They have to have the shooters pinned by now—"

"So let me go to her!" he shouts, bending down to dig his fingers into the knotted muscle seizing above his knee.

"Your knee is fucked, Will—"

"He has a good point, Charlie—"

Elliot and Sloan chorus together.

"No thanks to you," Will responds to Elliot, turning on Sloan. A look of pained remorse flashes across her face.

"And if they decide to move back onto this floor?" Charlie rounds on him and Sloan. "The gunmen know where we are, they know we're not moving, and you, Corporal Cripple, wouldn't stand a chance if they do decide to move in here, you'd just give them another million dollar hostage."

Sloan's mouth gapes for a moment before she responds. "I think Will is worth more than a million dollars, but I see your point."

"I don't care," is Will's only answer. He doesn't. He really doesn't. Cell service is down, the internet is down, the shooters may know exactly where MacKenzie is, and it won't take them long to find them hiding here, either.

Where they fall is where they land.

He needs to go to her.

"You can barely stand," Sloan says, ducking under his arm and wrapping one her own around his waist. It doesn't matter.

Charlie rounds on him again, closer. "You _should_ care. Do you think getting yourself taken hostage will help get MacKenzie out of here any faster?"

(Where they fall is where they land.)

* * *

They've managed to put together something resembling a bed, or cot, rather, and get her on it without waking her up. Jim checks the dressings (they haven't bled through, thank God) before covering her with the fire blanket again.

She's so pale.

Sweat dots her forehead and cheeks, her upper lip, drenches her hairline. _Soon_, he thinks, wiping at her skin with his sleeve. _Soon, Mac. Just hang in there. Can't be much longer. _Mac is grey. Jim thinks he's realized that, he's watched it happen, watched all the pink drain from her face, but the revelation is shocking anyway. She's grey. The only color left on her face is the bluish-lavender tinge to her eyelids.

Every rise and fall of her chest is accompanied by a whistling little wheeze.

_It's time._

Jim feels movement at his side.

Maggie winds her arm through his, and then wends their fingers together, resting her head on his shoulder. Jim doesn't know how to tell her it's not her fault. He doesn't know how to explain that Mac would have gone back for any of them. Doesn't know how to explain that Maggie went back for Daniel, that it's the same exact thing, that she and Mac are cut from the same cloth, that Mac knew it from day one. He doesn't know how to explain it, so he turns his face towards hers and presses a kiss into her hair.

Mac stirs, her eyelids fluttering open violently to reveal the whites of her eyes.

"Jim," she rasps, consonants sloppy and half-formed, shoulders twisting where she's been propped up. "Tell Billy I'm sorry, you have to tell him I'm sorry—"

Don makes a deeply-pained sound from somewhere to the side.

Jim smooths back Mac's hair, trying to soothe her. He doesn't know how. He can take her pulse and apply dressings and he knows the protocols, and the rules, but he doesn't know how to watch her die.

"Tell him yourself, Mac," he whispers, and echoes. He knows where she is.

When she is.

She came home last time.

He looks at Don, and then Maggie, who is lifting herself away from him. "It's time. I'm gonna go get him."

"No," Maggie says, shaking her head, resolute. "I am."

"Maggie—" he and Don both try to say.

"Jim—you need to stay, you know first aid." As if it matters, at this point, but Maggie's tone and face brook no argument, like old Maggie, like the girl who used to convince him she could do anything. "And I'm the smallest. I won't—I won't freeze again. I'm going to get Will. It's going to me."

And then, without waiting for a response (Jim doesn't think he can give her one, and neither can Don, guessing by the look on his face), Maggie bends down, kisses Mac on the forehead, and is out the door.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	14. Chapter Fourteen

**A/N: **I'm pretty jammed with finals until Friday night, so this might be the last update until then... for which I apologize. I realize where I'm leaving off and I promise that I will try very hard to work on this when I can to resolve the cliffhanger as quickly as possible. (Probably to only leave you on another one, but what can you do?)

Thanks to: **Theauthorx**, **theletterdee**, **DanaWhitaker**, **Ellie 5192**,** Lattelady**, **Tripple-A-Plus**, **jacobn**, **awesomesausome**, **MoonlightGardenias**, **TheGingerGuineaPig**,** ErynGrace**, **rachellehr16**,** Emeinthetardis**, **gwen**, **weB3now**, and **Guest** for reviewing the last chapter!

* * *

**CHAPTER FOURTEEN:**

* * *

She goes back for the medallion.

It's stupid and it might get her killed, but she wants it. It's Mac's, and Mac needs it back.

Maggie makes herself as small as possible, dashing across the bullpen to her desk, jerking the top drawer open and snatching the gold chain from the mess, frantically trying to separate it from a tangle of pens and highlighters. Her hands aren't shaking—adrenaline, perhaps, finally kicking in—and she's able to separate out the necklace from her mess of writing utensils and paper clips and when she feels the bite of cool metal in her hand, she's pivoting, and off.

Not bothering to shut the drawer again, she sprints for Will's office.

If she hears a door open, she'll drop. That's it. That's the plan. She's already covered in blood. She'll drop, and hold her breath.

_St. Jude, I don't know any prayers for you_.

Thirty feet… twenty feet…

Glass crunches under the soles of her flats, and she's close: ten feet… five feet… Will's door and wall are complete blown out so she vaults over the remnants of his exterior office wall, almost slipping on the fractured shards upon landing, but Maggie catches herself against his desk. Blood pounding in her ears, she drops low, and then tentatively to her knees, crawling the rest of the way to the bathroom door, trying to ease her racing heart, her frantic breaths.

She has no idea what to say to him.

Her entire front is covered in blood, and she's the girl who fucking wrote _LOL _on a fucking _bereavement _card. She doesn't have a very good track record and she can't… she can't fuck _this_ up.

She also can't wait. She can't freeze, like before.

She's Margaret fucking Jordan and the cards are down. She's tough. She's gone out to face bullets three times now. She's Margaret Jordan, and she's tough. She can be tough like Mac, and Jim, and Don, and Will. She can do this.

She lifts a hand to door, the medallion falling to the inside of her palm. Her eyes drift shut for the barest moment, and she tucks it all away. All her nerves, and her panic. She's not going to look back. She's going to do this.

For Mac.

Pressing the medallion into the soft skin of her sticky, blood-slicked palms, she raises two fingers to the bathroom door, and knocks.

"It's Maggie," she says, not daring to raise her voice above the sound of softly-cracking glass. "Let me in."

* * *

They all turn at the sound of Maggie's voice, quiet as it is, coming through the door. Sloan knows that none of them are too stupid to figure out what the fact that Maggie's dared to come, in person, means. Cell signal is down. Internet is down. For Maggie, of all people, to have come in person…

Will's gone white.

It's Charlie who unlocks the door, opens the door, his face creasing with despair when it swings open just enough, and Elliot's quiet "oh God," sells it before Maggie even slips through the door. Sloan digs her fingers into Will's sweater in an effort to keep him steady.

But he knows.

They all know.

Before Maggie comes through the door, they know it, but Sloan still has to look away when she sees it.

"No," Will croaks, falling away from her, towards Maggie. She lets him. Sloan wishes that she hadn't lied, that Don hadn't asked her to lie. That she'd told Will when she found out an hour ago, that he could have gone to Mac an hour ago and gotten an hour more.

They all know why Maggie's come, even before she sidles through the crack in the door, her pristine white blouse splattered with blood. With the front of her tan wool skirt matted with blood, dark red and half-dried. With a haunted, seeking, kind of look in her eyes.

It takes Maggie a second to be able to look at Will, and in that long, stretched-out, second she pushes her hair behind her ears, revealing fingers with blood caked into the cuticles and under the fingernails, dried into the whirls of fingerprints. But her eyes, although red and swollen, reveal a startling amount strength. She and Will come together, and Maggie seems to anticipate it, her hands flitting from under his forearms, down, and back. Sloan thinks that Maggie is smaller but so much stronger than him in this moment, when his hands come to finally rest on her shoulders, desperation settling in over his features. Whatever Maggie's been through with Mac, Don, and Jim in the past hour and half has rendered her resolute, strong enough to burden Will's grief.

His voice is low, pleading, when he finally speaks. "Tell me she's not…"

Maggie swallows, jaw tense. Exhales through her nose, steadily shakes her head. Her hands slide up from his forearms to cover his hands where they rest on her shoulders.

_No, _Sloan thinks. They can't stop from Will from going to her now. None of them will. None of them have the heart to. Charlie looks stunned in a finished kind of way, Elliot too, and Sloan can only guess how she looks. But she knows how she feels; like they're coming up on an ending. They're only spectators now. Or maybe, Sloan thinks, they've been spectators all along. They just never thought the show would end this way.

It's not fair, she thinks, blinking back tears. She does the math—if the gunmen weren't holding Reese Lansing hostage in the stairwell, SWAT and the paramedics would be almost ready to clear this floor, if they weren't doing it already. Mac would be on her way to the hospital. New York Presbyterian, probably, and Will would donate a goddamn wing to the hospital out of gratitude and in a month there'd be a diamond on Kenzie's finger and a summer wedding shortly after that.

It's not fucking fair.

Maggie's voice wavers, but she gets the words out, steadying Will when his leg almost gives out from under him:

"We thought you should be able to say goodbye."

* * *

"Mac, you need to wake up."

Don drops down beside him, a wet cloth in hand. Mac's mouth is full of blood again, and it's pooling at the corners of her lips. Don wipes it away, folding the cloth and pressing it against her papery skin with a tenderness Jim didn't know he could expect from him.

Jim reaches back to grab Mac's hand, rubbing his thumb over the backs of her fingers, trying to work some life back into them. "Come on, Will's coming. Will's on his way, Mac. You have to wake up."

"What do we do if they get here and she won't wake up?" Don asks quietly, pausing in his ministrations. _What if we waited too long? _is the unspoken corollary to Don's question.

Jim shakes his head, squeezing her fingers between his own. "She's going to wake up. Mac always comes through. She'll come through."

They've seen some things, MacKenzie and him.

_I don't want to be something that happened to you_, Mac has told him years ago, slurred it into his ear while he held on to her, too tightly, in the back of that Jeep to that hospital in Islamabad. Jim wonders if that's what she thinks she is. Something that happens to people, before she goes away. _I'm sorry, Jimmy_, she had said. Jim can't remember if he had said anything in response, or if he had just continued to hold her too tightly until they pulled into the ambulance bay, and by then she'd been begging for Will. For Will to forgive her.

He remembers that first month out with the marines. He remembers, shaking her shoulder with his free hand, chiding her to wake up, like it was morning again in Afghanistan, like the marines were going to tease her about her bedhead. He remembers this too.

Mac had said she was sleepy, creeping back from the fire to their tent and maybe Jim should have paid more attention to the fact that this was Mac's first time alone, really alone, since they had gone to Afghanistan. But he'd gone back ten minutes after her to retrieve something he'd forgotten (he can't quite remember now, it'd been wiped from his brain relatively quickly, after getting back to the tent) and found her sobbing, inconsolable, into her sleeping bag. The kind of sobbing that gave no mercy to breathing, let alone speech, and he'd understood enough then, at twenty-five, to not ask. Not then, not ever. That some things simply didn't beg questions.

But he also couldn't leave her.

(It was then, Jim realizes now, that destiny clicked into place and he would be fated to follow MacKenzie McHale anywhere.)

He hadn't known what to do.

(He doesn't know what do to now. Just remembers what he did then, when she was crying so violently that he wasn't sure if she could hear him at all.)

"_Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song, and make it better. Remember, to let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better._" Maybe he's only comforting himself, but he keeps singing, trying to entice Mac to wake up—his hand on her shoulder, his nails digging into her palm, his hand on her cheek, trying to stroke life back into her, trying to get her to open her eyes. "_Hey Jude, don't be afraid, you were made to go out and get her. The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better._"

The St. Jude's medal had been a gift. Small and inexpensive, but her face had lit up and her eyes had watered and she'd hugged him. And he hadn't known it then, why Mac was so desperate, why she was running. He wasn't observant or even impertinent enough, honestly, to ask around about an ex or a bad situation back home, but Jim knew that Executive Producers didn't sign up to be embedded without a good reason, and anyone who spent any time with Mac back then could see how sad her smile could be, if you gave it time to ripen.

_Causes are only lost when we give up_, he'd written on the card, some phrase he'd heard before, a quote he still can't quite place, and it's almost bothering him now, as absurd as it is. It feels important.

He wants to shake her awake. The medal worked last time. She hadn't given up, and now she knows that Will loves her.

"_And anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain, don't carry the world upon your shoulders._" He hadn't wanted to leave her then. He'd known her maybe six months, but he couldn't leave her. He'd given anything for her not to leave him now. "_For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool, by making his world a little colder_."

Jim doesn't even know if she kept the necklace. Mac had worn it while they were overseas, but it'd gotten lost in the shuffle after she'd been stabbed.

She opens her eyes, and he stops singing.

"Tell Will—" she slurs, her lips moving slowly to form the words.

"No, Mac," Don says, trying to comfort her, moving into her line of vision. "He's coming. Will's coming, Mac.

"He's coming?" she asks, eyes sliding in and out of focus. She coughs, the hard 'c' catching in the back of her throat, forcing blood into her mouth. Jim helps her sit up, and Don holds the towel to her mouth, supports her head, before they coax her down onto her back again. Jim's breath hitches when he sees how unfocused her eyes are, glazed with pain and dulled by blood loss, low blood pressure, whatever else.

"Yeah, he's coming Mac," Jim answers, brushing more hair out of her face. "Maggie went to get him. Will's coming. Just hang in there, a little bit longer."

She smiles warmly up at him, her gaze still not quite focused on him. It's upsetting in some strange way Jim can't exactly explain. "I love you, Jimmy."

"I love you too, Mac," he manages to reply. _Don't cry. Don't fucking cry. She deserves better_. He focuses on brushing the hair out of her face, again and again. "I'd follow you anywhere, you know that, right? From one warzone into another."

Her nose crinkles a bit, before her face evens out again. She's in pain again, he thinks. Pain, or something worse. Jim doesn't know what could be worse. "Are you still talking about how I didn't—I didn't tell you… that… that Will…"

Jim laughs at that. So does Don. Strange smiles, exchanged in this little room. Jim thinks he won't be smiling for quite a while after this. Maggie will be back with Will any second, and even that will change everything. _God, Will, _he thinks.

"Nah, I'm over it," he says, wiping at his nose.

The fingers on the hand not in his twitch restlessly at her side, and Mac tries to move her hand from under the blanket. It takes him a fair few seconds to realize she's trying to bring her hand to his cheek. It upsets him more than he wants it to, to lift her hand to the side of his face. But he takes her directions, even the tacit ones, well. Always has.

Her smile is brighter than it has any right to be. "You loved me when I was unworthy of being loved."

"Don't say that," he tries to say, but Mac shushes him with a weak shake of her head.

"No… I—I thought I was… for a long time." She manages to drag her thumb across his cheek, and that's how he realizes that he's crying. "You saved me, Jimmy."

Not quite wanting to think about what that means, coming from her, he instead turns his head into her palm, cupping her hand in both of his, kissing her palm. "I'm sorry I can't now."

Her smile doesn't falter, even if her eyes are slipping more and more closed with each self-assured nod of her head. "It's okay. Take… take care of him."

Closing her fingers into her palm, he chances another look at Don, the rising panic on his face. "Hang in there, Mac," Don says, a little louder than before, placing his hand on her shoulder again.

Jim kisses the back of her hand. "Hey Jude, we're not giving up on you just yet."

Her eyes flutter again, and Mac gives him a tired smile.

The door opens, and Don turns. Jim instead watches Mac's face, more interested in seeing her eyes brighten at who's in the doorway.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	15. Chapter Fifteen

**A/N: **Sorry for the wait! But I think I'm well and properly recovered from finals now, so hopefully there won't be as much as a gap between this and Chapter Sixteen. Thanks for waiting! Also thank you for the overwhelming response to Chapter Fourteen. I'll be answering all of your lovely reviews in a moment.

Shout-outs to: **Dana Whitaker**,** newsroomfan**,** groovymumma**,** Guest**(s),** Tripple-A-Plus**,** Ellie5192**,** awesomesausome**,** FluorescentAdolescent97**,** jacobn**,** Rapsberry Not Pink**,** fanficfanuk**,** Cloe83**,** MoonlightGardenias**,** TheGingerGuineaPig**,** Antigone Sycamore**,** Alessandra**,** Sarah**,** cybercat08**,** rachellehr16**,** Clemence **(holla),** justannw**,** tooemptyforyou**, and** ErynGrace**.

* * *

**CHAPTER FIFTEEN**

* * *

"Stay awake, honey." Another kiss drops onto her forehead, her damp hairline. "Stay with me." Warm hands frame her face, and she opens her eyes to see Will, terrified and pale and a little out of focus, but smiling down at her. "Hi."

"Hi," she whispers back as a paramedic tapes the IV tube to her arm. "Trying."

He's kneeling by her head, and while she can't help but think that this can't be good for his knee, she's still very glad that he's appeared there during the black swath of time where being lifted onto the backboard had rendered her unconscious. Little gaps, she thinks. She slides in and out of them with ease.

_Have they cleared the floor then?_ she wonders. _Where are the shooters?_

"I love you," he whispers, half-desperate, into her hair. There are other people's hands on her body but she can barely feel them at all, just his. Warm where they lay. "I love you so, so, much." His fingers fan out, petting her hair, smoothing down the side of her head and Mac lets her eyes slide closed. Warm. Another kiss, near her temple. "Please don't leave me again. Please don't leave."

_Again?_

"You're going to be fine, MacKenzie."

"Love you too," she manages to get out. Says it because she _can_ now.

It's nice to hear him say it, too.

She's missed hearing him say it.

"Do you know her blood type?" she hears one of the paramedics ask. "AB positive," someone responds, or two people, maybe. Both Will and Jim know. Maybe they both answered. She doesn't know why this question is sticking in her head. She lets it go. "Is she allergic to any medication?"

"Phenobarbital."

How does Will even remember that? When he signed the form to become her medical proxy when her parents moved to London in 2006 she'd given him a brief medical history, but that was six years ago.

"Is she on any medications, currently?" is the next question. MacKenzie tries to open her mouth to answer, but her voice is garbled, the words distance and out of reach when she tries to formulate them, the syllables rushing up against her teeth and being pushed back like the tide against a jetty.

Jim, who she had made her medical proxy on the flight to Germany to keep Will from getting a phone call, is the one to answer. "Yes… she um… anti-anxiety medication. A relatively high dose of anti-anxiety medication. Antidepressants. And something… beta blockers. Also something to help her sleep, but I don't think she takes it. A muscle relaxant, but I don't think she takes that either."

All true.

"Why is she taking muscle relaxants?"

Jim again. (Jim always.) "She was stabbed in abdomen when we were in Islamabad, back in '09. Blade nicked her spleen, and the surgeons in Pakistan weren't able to fix it laparoscopically so they had to open her up. And then by the time they got her airlifted into Landstuhl she was in DIC. She has some pretty nasty adhesions that get inflamed from time to time, when she's—when she's particularly anxious."

Will's hands flinch.

_Oh God, Will_. She never told him. She never told him any of it. Nothing about the twenty-eight months she was overseas, or the after.

And it's because she knows why it's taken him so long to forgive her, because she knows about his father, she knows why, and she never—did she believe she doesn't deserve Will's concern or did she truly believe that it would be manipulative to tell him? Or both? She thinks both are probably equally valid.

Don speaks next. How does he—did she tell him this? "Xanax, she takes Xanax. She has two prescriptions—a daily dose and a rescue dose."

"I know she keeps her medications in her purse—it's—it's right outside the door," Maggie says, but Mac thinks Maggie knows that just because Maggie is a particularly observant girl.

"Okay, we'll take a look. Now let's get her moved onto the stretcher."

* * *

He feels gutted. Or he would, if his body wasn't pulsing with adrenaline and half a dozen other fight-or-flight hormones, if he wasn't too entirely aware of his intestines knotting and twisting in his stomach as the paramedics lift MacKenzie onto the stretcher, secure her down with straps and buckles, one paramedic fixing an oxygen mask to her face while another hung a bag of fluids off the stretcher.

_Anti-anxiety medication. Antidepressants. Sleep medication. Muscle Relaxants. Beta blockers. _He knows why she didn't tell him, about any of it. And it's his own damn fault.

Is this how she felt in the emergency room last May? Because she's found him on his bathroom floor, too. Except absolutely none of this is her fault.

She exhales, chest moving raggedly, the plastic fogs.

They've rarely ever had good timing (Will's often wondered what would have happened if he had met her a month earlier or month later, if she had taken her first job with ACN earlier, or a year later, if he'd gotten his head out of his ass sooner about Nina, if she had picked up her phone when he'd called, well over a year ago, if seventeen other things), which explains how he and Maggie returned to find two SWAT officers in Mac's office and three paramedics lifting MacKenzie onto a backboard while Jim and Don stood anxiously to the side.

The electronic locks to the stairwells had been remotely activated, Jim had explained, and so the police had cleared use of the service elevator to start evacuating floors.

They've got her sedated now, given her something to blanket her frayed nervous system.

_I've been exhausted since I was thirty. _He should have pushed. But no, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. They're going to fix this. She's going to live and they're going to fix this. He's going to take care of her, and it's going to be fine.

He stands quickly, ignoring his knee, and follows at her side until they reach the wide service elevator, where he laces their fingers back together, ignoring the fact that it's been six long years starved of simple intimacies. Time stutters sideways for a moment when she squeezes his fingers, and then slides back into place.

Mac's eyes are open, but hazy, and while Will is incredibly thankful that whatever painkillers the paramedic pumped into her IV are working, he's still terrified. Terrified, where Don, Jim, and Maggie look like they're vacillating on a pendulum of relief and anxiety.

_Death is a force_, he thinks, when her mouth splits into a smile under the condensation dotting the oxygen mask. Not a bullet in a gun, or the blade of a knife. He'll keep her safe, now, and then they'll fight their demons. He can stay strong for her, because she's stood by for two and a half years. She's stayed strong for him. She's stood by, waiting until he was ready to tie up loose ends. She came back. She'll come back. MacKenzie comes back.

_Love is a force._

"Shh… don't try to talk," he says, when he realizes the strangled moan coming from her throat is an attempt at speaking. Leaning over her, Will brushes the hair off her forehead and presses a kiss to her temple. Pulling back slightly, he feels a surge of pure adrenaline in his gut when her eyes are clearer, focused on his.

"I love you," he whispers fervently. It doesn't matter that they're in a fucking service elevator, with three paramedics who should probably sell this to a tabloid (he would, if he was in their position; he knows exactly what New York City paramedics get paid), and Maggie and Jim and Don. Well, he thinks, those three probably already know, from what Maggie told him. And either way, he doesn't live in even remotely the neighborhood of giving a fuck anymore. "I'm always going to be in love with you, for the rest of my life. I love you, and I'm sorry for everything I've done to hurt you. I love you, and you're—" His voice chokes, briefly, and he clears his throat. "—You're going to fine, and we're going to get married."

That's presumptive.

He doesn't care.

She smiles, eyes fluttering, and his heart soars.

"In a few minutes, we'll be out of here, and I'm gonna spend the next couple of hours in a New York Presbyterian waiting room, and then God help the next person who tries to keep me from staying by your side." His hand strokes her hair back over her forehead, over and over again. "There's a ring in my desk drawer, and it belongs to you. It's always belonged to you. I'm sorry I took so fucking long to get here, MacKenzie, I'm sorry I was almost too late."

Her hand staggers up from her side, enclosing over the oxygen mask. Her eyes nearly cross when she looks at it, trying to get her fingers to clamp down, move it enough to the side that she can speak. "It's—"

"Honey, don't try to—"

"It's okay," she gets out, words malformed, half-aborted. "Will—it's—it's okay."

"It's really not." He kisses her forehead, grabbing her hand and laying it over her waist. She emits a little cough which, under better circumstances, he thinks might have been a snort. "But, um, that's not the point. The point is that we're gonna get you to the hospital, and you're gonna be okay, you're gonna be just fine, Mac, and I'm gonna take care of you until you get better."

Her hand comes to the oxygen mask again, and she looks more lucid than she did ten minutes ago, probably thanks to the pain medicine and fluids, or maybe her body's just rallying one more time, a corner of her mouth quirking up into a half smile. "And then… we're gonna get… married?"

Despite everything (or perhaps not, maybe _because_ of it—the absurdity of the universe, mad and wonderful as it is, conspiring to put them here, in this moment) he finds himself smiling down at her. "Stop talking," he rumbles, kissing her again, like punctuation. "But yeah. Four hundred people. Or city hall. Whatever the fuck you want, I literally _could not _care less. But you have to hang in there, honey. Just a little bit longer, okay? Just—just stay with me. Stay awake."

She nods, but he can tell that she's struggling even though she's regained some of her lucidity, the arm holding her oxygen mask in place shaking with the effort.

Blessedly, the elevator reaches the bottom floor. A police officer manning the loading dock opens the door manually, ushering them through. Panic flashes across her face when they begin to move again.

"Soon, sweetheart, I promise. Just make it to the ambulance, MacKenzie." They're moving again, and he's doing his best to push the sharp pain in his leg out of mind; she needs him, so he lopes down the loading bay with as much grace as he can manage, clinging to her hand while the paramedics and police officers give direction. Will refuses to break eye contact with her. "We're almost there."

"Stay with me?" she pleads, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. For the first time of this whole ordeal, she looks afraid.

"As long as I can." He squeezes her hand. "And I'll be there when you wake up. And every moment after that."

There's an ambulance waiting for them, while waiting for the paramedics to secure Mac into the back of it, Will catches Lonny out of the corner of his eye. Right. Of course. They've just been shot at. Of course his body guard is back.

"I'm going with—" Will begins to say, already climbing up onto the back of the rig. He's prepared to fight Lonny on this.

Lonny approaches with his hands out in front of him. "Hey, you take care of your girl. I'll follow in the car. Which hospital?"

"Presbyterian," one of the paramedics—Will realizes that he really needs to catch their names before this is over—answers. "Weill Cornell, 68th Street entrance."

Lonny nods, pivoting with his keys in head. Will notices (notices isn't the right word, because he hasn't forgotten they're there, couldn't, with Jim's hovering and Maggie's harsh breathing and Don's occasional curses, under his breath) Don and Jim and Maggie, still standing in the loading dock, and shouts for Lonny again, pointing at them. "Take them with you!"

"Copy!"

The ambulance doors swing shut, and they pull away from the AWM building.

* * *

Her head is spinning, her stomach is lurching, each nerve in her body alight and shutting down and she's running hot and cold, her head spinning to an out-of-control blur and then stopping before starting again until she no longer feels tethered to anything, except Will's hand in hers and the occasional brush of his lips against her forehead.

His words draw her back, like a lifeline. Faintly she hears a beep on one of the moniters, the hiss of an oxygen tank.

And then it all goes away again, the press of his hand around her fingers the last thing to remain.

There's so much that she wants to say back to him, so much that's going to have to wait until after—

It feels as if her life has been cleaved in two; it has for years now. Before Will and after, but now this is the division line. She will wake up from this and she will be Will McAvoy's fiancé. They'll be together again. And there's a lot more that she, even though her drug-addled brain, knows they need to work on, but they'll be together.

They'll be together.

Will is staying, and she isn't leaving. Not anymore.

Did she say it? Head spinning, thoughts refuse to settle or coalesce into any cogent train of thought; she can't remember.

_Did you say it?_

"I love you."

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


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